Like Bulldog Drummond

We had been served Searching (2018) as a preview on many, many discs, and it looked interesting but not really our thing. Then it got a bunch of praise in some random movie podcast episode, mainly for John Cho. Which makes sense, because this is totally his movie.

The gimmick is that the whole movie takes place on a computer screen, or on a few computer screens. It starts with a fresh new Windows 97 start screen. We watch someone save a first video of a child being born. Through stored videos and pictures, we see John Cho and his wife Sara Sohn raise their daughter Michelle La. We see some emails about Sohn's cancer, see it go into remission, the recur, then her funeral. That takes us up to the present day. We see Cho message his daughter about taking out the trash. She Facetimes him from a study group at a friends house, and says she'll be back late. But she doesn't come back.

Cho is a kind of a nervous father, so he quickly starts calling around. He finds she didn't come to school and she hasn't been going to piano lessons. He calls in the police, and get detective Debra Messing assigned. She is a hard-nosed, empathic type, and Cho's internet research shows that she is highly regarded. But he is going to have to help out, so he logs onto his daughter's laptop.

He checks her social media, and finds that she has a lot of acquaintances, but no one really feels like they are her friends. She has been broadcasting on some kind of real-time Tik-Tok app, just talking about life without her mother, and has some followers there. Some even seem a little too close. But they all check out. A few days go by, and they only seem to reach dead ends. Messing thinks it is likely that she just ran away. Then they find her on a traffic cam, and then her car. But not her.  

The format is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is just the formal, technical angles, like in a found footage movie. The other is that we have to see that whole process through a narrow window, and Cho is also looking for his daughter through a narrow window. Although they were close, Sohn's death lead them both to withdraw - we see Cho messaging La that her mother would be proud of her, then deleting it. It seems like nobody really knows her, except maybe Cho's stoner brother. Joseph Lee, who becomes a suspect in a very creepy scene. 

There are also a few nice twists in the third act, and SPOILER a happy ending. But it sort of came at the cost of the character story about Cho and La. But I don't mind because through the whole thing Cho's acting is incredibly strong. He's confused, out of his depth, but never gives up and you can feel it.

Two final points:

• The movie took place in Santa Clara, near where I live and work. And a lot of things were moved around (Pacheco Pass moved north of San Jose, for ex). It's a little distracting. 
• I never got the impression that La liked playing piano, and that one of the beats was that she was only doing it for her mom's memory. But no, the happy ending has her entering Conservatory. Oh well.