While 2018’s Searching may not be the first example of the
‘screenlife’ movie (even outside of producer Timur Bekmambetov’s prior
experiments with the format, it has been kicking around since the early 2000s
in works like Thomas In Love and The Collingswood Story), it has shown to be
the point where that particular style became viable. Where Unfriended
used the format as a means to prop-up dusty teen horror tropes and
characterisation, Searching dived head-first into turning Extremely Online
existence into a bedrock for tense thrills, in a way that felt very
Black Mirror and yet was wholly distinct from that show's usual style.
I checked out Searching as part of FilmInk detail, and while
I still think this kind of cinema is designed to watched at home via streaming
(same deal with Rob Savage’s Host and Dashcam), it showed that there was real
potential for this new(ish) avenue for found footage cinema. I know that
audiences and critics have grown tired of such things after the reign of terror
unleashed by Paranormal Activity, but as someone who also spends most of
my time attached to my computer screen, I’m more than okay with this becoming
more of a trend. Especially if it’s being done by the same crew as Searching,
which is the case here.
Well, not exactly the same crew, I should mention.
While Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian did the initial story treatment for this,
and are attached as producers, the writing and directing this time around are
being done by Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, who not only did the editing for
Searching but also Chaganty and Ohanian’s more traditional domestic thriller
Run. And quite frankly, if any other crew members had to be given the
reins for a new film, Merrick and Johnson were the best picks because… well,
quite frankly, it’s the editing that makes this format work. It’s the ability
to arrange all these different screengrabs of people’s smart devices, laptops,
and security cameras, in a way that keeps attention on the screen and (most
importantly) doesn’t let the screenshot aspect of the footage distract from the
story being told with it. Their work on Searching and Run is absolutely
brilliant, and helped make those films so bloody good as thrillers, so there’s
definite hope that they can still work in this bigger position.
And work they do, as while the story being told is along the
same lines as Searching in its cyber-sleuth framing to do with a missing family
member, it goes the Taken 2 route and switches it to the child being the
one who tracks down the missing parents, in this case being Storm Reid as June.
Right from the start, with a showing of an episode of ‘Unfiction’ that is an
in-universe dramatisation of the events of Searching, the film creates an
understanding that there’s a certain perverse interest that these kinds of
stories engender in an audience. One that doesn’t usually let things being far-fetched
get in the way of the entertainment value. Admittedly, this film doesn’t go as
far into bending disbelief as, say, the pharmacy “I’m on a scavenger hunt”
scene in Run. But there’s still a sensationalist edge to the story, part of
which is in the narrative proper with all the news footage and Podcast Bro
reactions to events as they unfold.
But quite frankly, the pacing and tense atmosphere are just that
exacting that it’s difficult to care much about such niggles in the moment.
Editors Austin Keeling and Arielle Zakowski do a terrific job of keeping things
moving as June exercises as many options as she can in trying to find out why
her mother Grace (Nia Long) and her boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung) never arrived
back from their holiday in Colombia. As I watched June cross-reference all
these different bits of data across so many platforms, along with
trial-and-error-ing her way into a few accounts, it felt I was seeing an
in-progress research stream from someone like Coffeezilla, and it’s honestly
kind of cool to be on the inside of the kind of in-depth work June puts into
figuring out what happened to her mother.
Where things get interesting on top of that is how the ease
at which June is able to put together a makeshift plan to sort through the
evidence, on two different fronts, manage to make this entire thing even more
unsettling to witness. On the first front, there’s the underlying idea that
someone, just with access to a computer, is even capable of doing
something like this, up to and including using an online freelance service to
get Colombian local Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to do some extra legwork for
her. Beyond just being another reminder that people who use one password for
everything really need to change things up, it also shows the true extent
of which the phrase “the internet is forever” applies to what we put onto it.
But the second front goes one step further, as June begins
to question if she really knows the people she’s looking for in the
first place. Like with Searching and Run, the main core of the emotional drive
here has to do with the complex relationship between parent and child and, more
specifically, the lengths that parents will go to for their children. Searching
showed unethical behaviour out of fear for a child’s life, Run was full of
medical gaslighting out of a warped sense of what it means to be a parent, and
Missing… well, I’m not going to spoil how that applies here, but let’s just say
that it looks at both sides of the equation when it comes to why someone
would attempt to cover up their digital footprint, and where that overlaps with
the real world.
In all honesty, between the length and the growing
familiarity with Chaganty and Ohanian’s style of storytelling, I can’t say I
got into this as much as Searching. Maybe it doesn’t feel quite
as novel, maybe it’s because of the specific character arcs being tapped into,
or maybe it’s just because I watched Run for the first time less than 24 hours
before this, and those are big shoes to fill for any film. But even with
that said, this is still very effective as a thriller, with incredible
pacing, punchy yet never overstated use of Julian Scherle’s soundtrack, and
Storm Reid doing quite well in keeping the audience’s attention when the
’camera’ spends so much of the time focused on her face.
As the third installment of a loose anthological universe
(containing references not just to Searching, but also a
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it epilogue for Run), I’ll admit that I’m definitely
interested to see where things go from here for this franchise. But as much fun
as this format still is for me, I would like to see a bit more variety with the
stories being told; there’s only so much that can be gotten out of parental
friction as the main dramatic point. Then again, that’s kind of what this
format is; what is screenlife if not the bratty, tech-savvy offspring of
found footage?
