01 Mar Searching (2018)

Folded Detection

As you will know, this is ostensibly all from a few computer screens, manipulated by the father of a missing teen girl. He is searching her various histories, supplemented by internet searches. As a detective, this constitutes the clues. The actual story is also told on screen, through a bit of a cheat, initially home videos, then FaceTime and video calls, surveillance cameras, TV news shows, even a YouTube capture.

So there is conceptually a separation between what we know and what he knows, even though as in most detective films they are procedurally the same.

The story apart from the screen gimmick is strong enough. With one big and two small red herrings, and a rather conventional twist. I will be rating this as worth watching, but want to counter the notion that this is a worthy experiment in the form.

The reason is that we never lose control to reality. This is a standard technique in ordinary films, that the world has its own agency. When you assign a separate world to one or more worlds within, you get real experimentation. In this case, the world we see is all we see. The twist depends on things we have not seen, so it does not play fair by the Sayers rule.

Unlike many commenters, I thought the main character, the father, was played poorly. This was a pretty complex role and I think we only saw one emotion at a time. The actress playing the cop so greatly mastered her similarly complex (and mirrored) role, that it made the father seem like poor acting. The funny thing is that when we see the father’s motions on the screen, the cursor’s emotions are conveyed more strongly (presumably by a different person) than the actor’s.

Posted in 2024

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB