Searching

Though it’s hard to believe it can be done, this entire movie unfolds on computer and phone screens. And it’s fascinating! I am not very tech savvy. For instance, I’ve never logged on to Facebook, have no idea how to tweet, don’t understand what a hashtag is. I’ve never even sent a text message, if you can believe that. But it was all perfectly understandable to even such as me.

It’s about a man whose teenage daughter goes missing, and his efforts to find her online. We see him using Skype, search engines, phone histories, security cameras … all the landscape of the cyber world. And it all happens on the screens. We never see a “regular” camera shot. Not once! It boggles my mind, the ingenious ways the scriptwriter/director, Aneesh Chaganty, making his first film, found to slowly reveal what’s going on. It’s an amazing tour de force. It is, according to Wikipedia, “the first mainstream Hollywood thriller” starring an Asian American, John Cho. He’s quite good. If you want to see something very, very different, you could hardly do better than this.