“David Kim’s daughter is missing. He can’t find out where she is, until he finds out who she is.”
The first time I saw the trailer for Searching was probably half a year ago, and I was immediately intrigued. The trailer told the story of a high school-aged girl went missing, his father, who claimed to know his daughter very well, used every possible resource online to search for her, only to find so many hidden facts about his daughter that he had no idea of.
I’ve been expecting Searching to come out since then, but deliberately kept my hopes down because there is this type of movie, that everything about it that’s worth seeing is in the trailer (cue Jurassic World and Crazy Rich Asian). In other words, the trailer is so good that the real movie disappoints you. However, with an intriguing trailer, Searching still managed to surprise me. In fact it’s the BEST movie I’ve seen this year.
There are two things about Searching that made it so much cooler than most other movies of its type.
First, the entire movie was presented through digital screens–phone, computer or video surveillance. You never see the characters in a real world context. 
(watching the movie is like looking through your own laptop, fun!)
For Searching, this visual presentation technique fits perfectly, because a major theme of the movie is to discuss how digital media has made it easy for people to fake themselves. When we see Margot (the daughter)’s so-called friend, who didn’t even know her and didn’t give a damn about her disappearance, live-streaming herself weeping over Margot’s missing just to get online viewers, yes I thought of somebody in my life as I rolled my eyes. You probably did too.
Second, as creepy as the trailer appeared to be, this suspense move is actually about love and family.
I was long expecting Searching to be a thriller, for how it was portrayed in the trailer, and that its trailer played right after the one for The Nun (the type of thriller that can seriously shorten my life span). After the Searching trailer repeatedly mentioned “marijuana,” I was so blindly confident that the missing daughter was involved in some sort of drug dealing, and realized how cliche I was when I found out that the movie is simply about love.
Margot changed, because she loved her mother — The death of Margot’s mom changed her life. It directly caused her to quit piano class and smoke weed, and contributed the most part to her missing. When fish_n_chips tried to make friends with Margot by making up the story of his own mother having cancer too, he could have never anticipated that Margot would actually send money to support him. It turns out, Margot is the kind and sweet girl who her father thinks she is.
David hided, because he loved her daughter — Sure, David’s love for Margot was pretty explicit–the whole movie is about him searching for her. But the misunderstanding between the two that in some way caused her missing, also implicitly showed David’s love as a father. Bearing the pain of losing his wife, David tried his best to not let his emotions out and upset Margot. Typing in “your mom would be proud too,” and deleting it, wanting to say something on her mom’s birthday but ending up saying “today is Tuesday,” David was too protective of his daughter to open some conversations.
Detective Vick killed, because she loved her son — The big question for a suspense movie would usually be “who’s the murderer?” In Searching, the “murderer” is Detective Vick. Though it was her son who, accidentally, pushed Margot off the cliff, Detective Vick was the one who, intentionally, covered the fact, volunteered to take the case, actively led the investigation into a completely wrong direction and went as far as to kill an innocent scapegoat. Behind every well-planned step is her love for her son. When she was finally revealed as the villain, I was shocked but at the same time convinced. She’s a mom. That explains everything she had done.
Talk Spoilers 