Searching (2018)

Amazon Prime's newest tearjerker begins with the line above, and well... they certainly did not lie. The film has a simple plot: a terminally ill man (John Cho) and his teenage daughter (Mia Isaac) road trip from California to New Orleans for his 20th college reunion. While there, he hopes he can reunite his daughter with the mother who left them. A perfectly straightforward story for a simple yet effective film.

The film's two main stars are an Asian man and a mixed teenager, so we already have a recipe for fantastic representation. John Cho is a Korean-American actor who is best known for his roles as Harold in the Harold & Kumar films, Sulu in Star Trek's reboot, and more recently, David in the hit thriller Searching. He has a wide range of both serious and silly roles, so he's always a delight to see. Mia Isaac, however, has made her debut with this very film! Mixed representation is surprisingly sparse and she seemed quite skilled even though this was her first work.

These two are honestly really the only important characters in the movie, however, we do see Wally (Mia Isaac)'s mother briefly who is African-American. There is also an interracial gay couple at the reunion who we get to know a bit but I loved them. Much of the rest of the cast is white but the few that aren't were nice to see.

Back in 2018, there seemed to be a new wave of experimental filmmaking on the rise: films taking place entirely within a computer. While the concept of “shooting” a film entirely on a computer wasn’t a wholly original concept, it was never flushed out until a couple of years ago. The two Unfriended movies, as well as Searching, had attempted to pull the “computer movie” concept forward in the past yet wasn’t replicated in the mainstream. Despite the relative success of each of those films, the computer-screen genre faded away, with only a small number of indie films attempting to pull the idea further. Now, in an age where we responsible types have mostly stayed indoors and have had to communicate primarily by online video calls, the time has never been better to capitalize on the computer-screen genre.

Shudder’s Host (not a particularly original title, I must say) attempts to bring the spooks to “the quarantine generation” by presenting us with a scary Zoom call during lockdown. Dying of boredom and needing something to do, a small group of friends assemble their weekly video call together and invite a Medium for fun. Things inevitably go sour fast when one of the friends makes an obvious mockery of the whole ordeal, summoning an evil spirit instead of anyone they’d wish to contact; from there, death and jump-scares ensue.