Review: ‘Searching’ — John Cho Captivates on the Big (And One Small) Screen
GIVE ME ALL THE JOHN CHO YOU’VE GOT
The critical and box office success of Crazy Rich Asians is deservedly the toast and talk of Hollywood right now, making many wonder why studios waited 25 years after 1993’s Joy Luck Club to tell an Asian American story with an all-Asian cast (I’m going to go with “racism”). But in a surprise twist, another movie with a predominantly Asian-American cast, Searching, is opening just a week later in limited release before a nationwide rollout on September 31.
Two Asian American movies in one week?! Are we in a golden age of Asian American cinema? And are we in danger of Asian American fatigue at the box office?
Only kidding, of course. But seriously, Searching — which stars John Cho and won both the feature film and Best of Next! audience awards at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival — may be the most inventive, gripping, emotional movie I’ve seen so far this year.
Watch the trailer for Searching below.
Cho plays David Kim, the recently widowed father of 16-year-old Margot (Michelle La), as he tries to put his and his daughter’s lives back together after the death of his wife Pamela (Sara Sohn) following a long battle with cancer. When Margot fails to come home after a late-night study session, misses school, and doesn’t respond to repeated texts and calls, David reports her missing, with detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) assigned to the case. Using Margot’s Apple laptop, David begins searching through her email, contacts, and social media trying to find anyone who can provide clues about Margot’s whereabouts and what her mindset might have been on the day she disappeared. As her digital clues reveal the secrets she’s been keeping from her father, and the possibility that Margot ran away from home shifts to the possibility of foul play, David must confront a reality that is both incredibly common and potentially terrifying for any parent — that he didn’t really know his own child, and his ignorance may have put her in danger.
If you watched the trailer, you know that Searching is told from the perspective of the computer and smartphone screens that are now an indispensable part of our lives. But what might seem like a gimmick — as it was for the real-time, found-footage Skype slasher movie Unfriended — is what makes Searching such a realistic, effective, consuming, and tension-filled mystery.
Searching starts with a montage of the Kim family’s life via a time-lapse trip through their home PCs. Using era-appropriate operating systems and applications, it’s full of digital photos, videos, calendar appointments, emails, and eventually social media posts marking milestones in Margot’s life, candid details, celebrations, and intimate moments, as well as the surprise, pain, determination, and sadness of Pamela’s seesawing battle with lymphoma. It’s a sequence that has rightfully been compared with the beautiful yet heartbreaking opening montage in Pixar’s Up, which wordlessly sums up a decades-long relationship in the span of a few minutes. But in Searching, it feels more personal and organic than cinematic, since it’s an accurate reflection of how our computers contain the modern-day diaries of our lives.
The digital communication between David and Margot over iMessage and FaceTime doesn’t feel like a storytelling conceit, but simply the way a modern family communicates, with constant contact and videochatting taking the place of physical proximity and face-to-face parenting, complete with a photo of an unemptied garbage can as a reminder to do chores. Even the way David sometimes writes, then edits or erases text messages serves as a visual representation of his struggle to find the right tone and words with his daughter, just as our drafts folder of emails and tweets can represent the honest truths we think better of telling others and the world.
When Margot goes missing, the screen view takes on another level of realism and urgency. Because when something in our lives is worrying us — whether it’s a medical issue, a natural disaster, or a political event — often the first thing we turn to is our screens as we try to get a handle on what’s happening. And in the case of a loved one going missing, their computer or smartphone would be the first places we’d look for clues, using any amateur hacking skills at our disposal to access their digital lives and get into their password-protected emails and private social media accounts, treating every photo as a clue and every name we can find as a potential witness or suspect. Writer/director Aneesh Chaganty smartly doesn’t keep us looking at a static screen, panning across it and zooming in to show what David is focusing on, and cleverly using the open FaceTime app (which defaults to the Macbook’s user-facing camera) to show us David’s reactions as he sits alone trying desperately to solve the mystery. Searching not only gives us a first-person view of what David is seeing, but also what we ourselves would be looking at if we found ourselves in the same situation.
And since I mentioned Crazy Rich Asians and Asian Americans in movies, it’s important to note that the shoes Chaganty wants viewers to step into and the eyes he wants us to see out of are those of an Asian American man, traditionally one of America’s most underrepresented (and underappreciated) demographics. Cho, as always, gives a terrific performance, and it’s wonderful to see him get to carry an entire movie in a meaty role that allows him to display such a wide range of emotions, from the quiet, resigned sadness of the film’s early minutes to his desperate, frantic rage as he lashes out as his chances of finding Margot alive start to fade. Despite working consistently throughout his career, Cho has long been criminally underused and largely relegated to supporting roles. As Paul Chi noted in his interview with Cho in Vanity Fair, Searching “is the first mainstream, contemporary thriller headlined by an Asian-American actor”. I hope that with his most powerful performance yet and the success of Crazy Rich Asians, Hollywood realizes that Cho is leading man material, and long has been.
And from the perspective of representation, the fact that three of the four main actors in Searching are Asian American (Joseph Lee plays David’s brother Peter) personally means a lot to me, while also enriching the characters and story. While there isn’t much in the script that specifically identifies David and his family as Asian, there are plenty of details in the film that had special resonance for me as an individual as well as an Asian American.
David’s reluctance/inability to talk to Margot about how he or she is dealing with Pamela’s death strikes me as a particularly Asian thing, where discussing or dwelling on painful memories is often considered to be unconstructive and an obstacle to moving on with life. If you disagree with that generalization, it at least applies to my own life growing up in a family where we rarely talked about our emotions, since if everything is fine, there’s nothing that needs to be talked about (though when things weren’t fine, that often didn’t get talked about either). Margot’s efforts to maintain the façade that she is happy and doing well also hits home on both a personal and cultural level because it seems like something borne out of parental respect and the feeling that good, providing parents don’t deserve to be burdened by their children’s problems. The same goes for David’s disapproval towards his pot-smoking, sports-obsessed brother Peter, since the enforcement of high expectations in Asian families (and my own) is often not solely the purview of parents.
Again, there are probably a lot of Asian Americans who might disagree with these characterizations of Asian families, as well as non-Asian people who are able to relate to the issues we see in David’s. But what is so important about the idea of diversity and representation is that because Searching has a predominantly Asian American cast, I as an Asian American have the opportunity to appreciate and relate to Searching on a level that films that lack Asian American characters don’t provide. It gives me the feeling that the makers of the film understand my family, my culture, and myself, and that I and other Asian Americans are not alone in our feelings and experiences. That is an incredibly positive and powerful thing, especially when you’ve been denied it for so much of your life. It’s an added feeling of connection that I imagine white people take for granted, since almost every American movie and TV show ever made offers them that opportunity.
Searching is a gripping, groundbreaking movie anchored by a fantastic lead performance by Cho. However, I worry that the screen view technique that is Searching’s greatest strength and makes the film so unique and effective will cause people to dismiss it as a gimmick before giving it a chance. I also worry about how and to whom Searching will be marketed, though I was happy to see a “making of” trailer for Searching before Crazy Rich Asians. Searching isn’t a horror movie, but it’s being distributed by Sony’s Screen Gems wing, which predominantly handles horror films, which tend to appeal to a younger audience who may not be as interested in the story of a missing teenager from a parent’s perspective.
But audiences at Sundance clearly recognized that Searching is something special, and I think anyone who sees it will agree and will quickly be sucked in by the film’s tight, creative, and immersive storytelling. And you don’t need to be Asian American or a parent to marvel at Cho’s enthralling performance, which proves that he deserves the spotlight and top billing he has been denied for far too long.
