Searching (Sept 8)

Searching is the story of a teenage daughter who dislikes her piano lessons so much that she runs away and/or is kidnapped. I can’t help but worry that after the initial glow of seeing the movie, it will age badly (and not in the charming way that Perfect Blue‘s Mima cannot handle the simplest aspects of the World Wide Web). Half suspect that this film exciting for the same reasons that I find The Magician‘s exciting, which is it’s shot in a place that’s relatively familiar to me. I live in San Jose, so I felt a little flutter of smugness whenever I saw a reference to my city that’s been altered in some way to avoid copyright infringement. Maybe this will feel as unwatchable as Toy Story in a few years, but for now it feels a little like my own personal high water mark for what you can do with found footage storytelling in this genre.

Searching‘s been on my radar for a bit, because it’s following on the coattails of a pretty spectacular run of movies with diverse casts this summer. I’ve been pretty agnostic about the found footage genre: never saw Cloverdale or Paranormal, was too young for Blair Witch, but I like the creativity that can breed in restrictive formalism. I like the one-guy-in-a-car concept in Tom Hardy’s Locke from a few years back, the weirdness of Unsane‘s images when limited to using the iPhone for shooting, and I like how hard the producers of Personal Shopper lean into the drama of textual conversation.

The part of the magic of the movie is the way it flirts with the worst possible suspicions, the morbid fantasies of every parent. The passage of time is kind of brilliantly handled, as is the period aesthetic of some of the visual displays from the 90s. The way in which the presentation accepts limits creates a ritualism to the visual field that’s very pleasing to watch. When that ritualism is violated in the interrogation scene and the set up of hidden cameras, it’s a little annoying. But for the most part, the disappointment with these departures affirms the success of the general rule. Part of the attraction of Searching is the relatively hands off approach it has to the morality of technology and social media (as is the case with Eighth Grade). There are intimations of cyber bullying and trolls and vicious screeds, but they’re left undiscussed in the background.

Final prognosis is: if you live in San Jose and want to see your home town represented in a new way, or if you really like catfishing, or if you get excited whenever you see a new way to represent texting on screen, then check on this movie, otherwise, maybe go see White Boy Rick?