The emotional thriller Searching proves good computer-screen movies aren’t a fluke
Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film’s premiere at the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival, where it played under the title Search. It has been updated for the film’s wide theatrical release.
In 2015, the movie Unfriended landed in theaters, telling a conventional supernatural revenge story with an unconventional conceit: the entire film took place on the screen of one character’s laptop. That approach really shouldn’t have worked, but Unfriended was nevertheless a creepy, unsettling, low-budget success. When I spoke with producer Timur Bekmambetov at the time, he envisioned “screen movies” as an entire...