DVD Review: Searching

Searching
[DVD Searching]

This contemporary technological suspense drama came out in 2018, and stars John Cho (Sulu in the recent reboot Star Trek films, among many other credits) as David Kim, the father of a teenage daughter, Margot. Both of them are still hurting from the relatively recent loss of David’s wife (and Margot’s mother) to cancer.

David is somewhat tech-savvy, but he still finds himself in over his head when his daughter disappears under odd circumstances, leaving her laptop behind. With the help of a driven police officer (Will & Grace‘s Debra Messing), David goes on a deep dive into his daughter’s social media, in order to try to decipher where Margot might have gone or what might have happened to her. This film has lots of dramatic twists and turns, and its exploration of Margot’s recent digital footprint shows that David doesn’t know his daughter as well as he thought he did.

The performances by Cho and Messing are both excellent, as are those of Michelle La as the 15-year-old Margot, and Joseph Lee as David’s brother Peter. The filmmakers’ skill at creating a narrative patched together from social media and interactions with laptops and smartphones is fantastic. In the “extras” on this disc, the actors talk about the challenges of performing opposite blank screens and their concerns about giving realistic performances without other actors to play off of — they manage to pull it off very well is this taut thriller.

My only warning is as follows — this probably looked great on a movie-theater screen, and probably still looks good on larger TV screens. But because so much of the “action” comes in the form of text on computer screens and smartphones, watching this on an old under-30″ TV made it hard to make out a lot of the important graphics that form the story’s narrative. If you’ve got a larger TV to watch on, this probably won’t be a problem. But if you’ve got an older, small TV screen, you may have some difficulty with all the visual details.

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Searching Facebook page ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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