David Kim (John Cho) is the techie father of Margot Kim, a 16-year-old teenager, whose mother died of cancer not too long before. Both of them struggle to overcome the loss. Margot, on the surface, is a normal American teenager. One day, without warning, she disappears and nobody seems to have any leads. After a day and a half of no progress whatsoever by the authorities, David manages to hack into Margot’s laptop and starts picking up the digital breadcrumbs which eventually leads him onto her trail.

A year and a half ago I reviewed the book The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O by Neal Stephenson. Here is an excerpt of my review:

It is a largely chronological assortment of diaries, emails, internal blog posts, government memos – sometimes heavily redacted, handwritten notes, narratives, translations, Wikipedia entries, and historic references. No one person tells the story. The author does not tell the story, and there is no major protagonist who tells the story. The various documents and excerpts, just posted one after the other, eventually tell the story.

My point was that Stephenson used a completely unconventional story-telling format, one I had never seen used before, and he pulled it off.

The structure of this film is similarly unconventional. There is no “normal” footage at all. The entire story is told by watching either a computer screen, a phone screen, and video feeds from the news, GPS screens, video chats, instant message chats, emails, Google searches and other digital formats. There is no film footage at all.

Yet, it works and it tells the story unlike any other medium could.

For instance, at one time David is chatting with his daughter in a text box, and the messages jump back and forth. Then David types a sentence, while – as we know – his daughter sees the ” . . . ” bubble indicating that a message is being typed. David thinks better of sending that sentence and backspaces it away. This simple gesture we all experience in our digital lives all the time tells more than any narration or video could. The technique is perfect for the story.

The digital footprints we all leave in our modern lives are central to the story and Searching exposes vulnerabilities in our world that didn’t exist when I was a teenager and completely immersed in the “real world.”

In addition to this unique and refreshing format, there are several major plot twists that jolted me and kept me in suspense. It all came together as one of the best movies I have watched in a while.

You should definitely go and see Searching. You will not regret it.