I may not be devoting
all of my time and effort to covering movies – bad, good or otherwise – these days, but that doesn’t mean I stopped
loving them. So once a month, I’ll spread a little bit of that love…
I’m grateful for the time I
spent covering bad movies for a number of reasons, but one of them is that it
gave me an appreciation for films that fall outside of the mainstream,
nation-wide consciousness. Don’t get me wrong: I look forward to the next
Marvel extravaganza as much as anyone else. But much like finding a hidden gem
of a film buried in bad movie muck, there’s a great joy in discovering that a
small, quietly released movie is actually all sorts of fantastic.
Take this month’s installment: Searching.
On the surface, Searching is another one of those
gimmicky films where the entire story takes place on a computer screen. There
are a number of these films floating around out there, and while I’ve heard
varying things about them, they never interested me – they sounded all gimmick
and no substance. I’m not sure what made me give Searching a whirl, but I’m glad I did because this one’s the real
deal.
There are a number of things
that make Searching work. One aspect
is very simple: Plot-wise, this is a very simple story. In a nutshell, widower
John Cho’s teenage daughter goes missing, and he’s searching for her. Unlike
all the other “the entire movie is on the computer” gimmicks I’ve heard about,
there are no Internet ghosts or possessed servers, no jump scares, no nonsense.
Another big aspect, and this can’t
be overstated, is John Cho’s performance. He carries the film as the grieving,
guilt-riddled and increasingly desperate dad, and he is amazing. He does so much just with the look on his face, seemingly
aged 20 years overnight. Has it really been that long since Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle? (checks
IMDB)… Yeah, pretty much.
Finally – and this is why I’m
making this a MotM/Video Essay Super Post – is the fact that this isn’t just a
thriller with a gimmick layered over it. The fact that this story is told over
computers is very intentional, as it feeds directly into the film’s core themes
of connectivity (and the lack thereof) in a social media age.
For more on that, I’d like to
refer you to the latest from Lessons from the Screenplay. Here, Michael not
only digs into the thematic connection between the story and the format, but
even talks about how the actual screenplay portrayed chat conversations, web
searches and more in a way that made it very clear to the reader.
[The video has spoiler tags, but
there’s nothing here that would blow the whole movie for you.]
It’s not often I find a film I’d
recommend without qualifications, but here we are. Congratulations, Searching:
You are the Movie of the Month.
