Search­ing

Open a paper, switch on the radio, flip open a brows­er on your favourite news chan­nel, and there are peo­ple scream­ing that we are spend­ing too much time online. Won’t some­body think of the chil­dren? Direc­tor Aneesh Cha­gan­ty has cho­sen to ride the dig­i­tal sat­u­ra­tion out­rage wave by mak­ing a movie which is deliv­ered entire­ly through dig­i­tal record­ing meth­ods and instant mes­sag­ing soft­ware – an act of high-wire for­mal trick­ery which fum­bles about twen­ty min­utes in and spends a good hour dan­gling there while look­ing a bit silly.

John Cho plays con­cerned sin­gle par­ent David, who is forced to hack into his daughter’s lap­top when she goes miss­ing one evening. Although still depressed at the recent pass­ing of his wife from can­cer, David sin­cere­ly believes that his pater­nal nur­tur­ing creds are sec­ond to none, and so is a lit­tle per­turbed to dis­cov­er that his appar­ent­ly cheery daugh­ter has been fun­nelling her piano les­son subs to some mys­tery avatar.

Enter Debra Mess­ing as the steely detec­tive with a spe­cial inter­est in prob­lem chil­dren, and you’ve got a mess of after-hours video chats, dys­pep­tic emails, social media sleuthing and lots and lots of googling. The issue here is that Cha­gan­ty flails and scram­bles to extend the thin mate­r­i­al to fea­ture length, throw­ing in dumb red her­rings and dumb­er twists just to make Search­ing feel like a prop­er movie.

Cho takes the mate­r­i­al seri­ous­ly enough to at least give his char­ac­ter a mea­sure of cred­i­bil­i­ty, but the unfold­ing mys­tery is so sil­ly – and so des­per­ate to pre­serve the moral right­eous­ness of the key play­ers – that it’s real­ly hard to care. Fur­ther­more, the time that has lapsed between the mak­ing of this film and its release has already made it feel a lit­tle tech­no­log­i­cal­ly obso­lete, so god knows what this will look like come 2019.