Searching

Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Screenwriters: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian

Institute History

Description

Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize

Audience Award: NEXT, Presented by Adobe

After a five-minute sequence of the Kim family’s online activity that beautifully relays a decade of their shared lives, Search drops us into the current online existence of family patriarch David and daughter Margot, a high school freshman. Parenting mainly through iMessages and quick FaceTime chats, David is initially more annoyed than concerned when a series of his texts go unreturned, but he soon realizes Margot has gone missing. While a helpful detective searches for Margot out in the real world, David grasps at rediscovering his daughter in an unfamiliar online landscape as he searches through the traces she left behind on her laptop.

In his inventive and entertaining feature debut, writer/director Aneesh Chaganty whips through narrative twists while constantly ratcheting up the tension, creating a compulsively watchable modern spin on the mystery thriller. John Cho’s genuine performance as an increasingly desperate and determined father imbues Search with depth and relatability, while the film zealously and playfully embraces the challenges and opportunities of its contemporary storytelling format and turns a computer screen into a cinematic canvas.

Winner: 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.

— H.Z.

Screening Details

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