woffyreal

I will preface this by saying I am a huge fan of Screenlife. Searching is one of my top favorite movies, so when this movie came out, I was excited to see it since it's more of a horror, like Unfriended (another movie I strongly enjoyed). Unfortunately, this is not comparable to either Searching or Missing.

• The writing. This movie, in the plot synopsis alone, is great. In execution, however, the plot is a clunky mess with almost cringy dialogue. (They make a Supernatural reference partway through! Why?) I saw reviews that say the format held it back, but I don't even think a conventional film could save this.

It uses a clip from Unfriended as if it actually happened, which would be fine, but it's specifically from the Skype call and not the in-universe internet media. That makes no sense; who was recording it, and who published it after?

• The pacing. Some parts drag painfully slowly, and some parts speed at breakneck. It's unwatchable. I never look away from my screen during movies, but I found myself desperately wanting to during this one. - The acting. I'm sure the lead guy is a good actor, but his work in this film is nothing short of terrible. It's flat, stunted, and the few times he's not just staring at a monitor, his physical direction is just... not there. His friend, however, is the actual worst actor in the film. He speeds through his lines like a table read, with no emotion, as if they went with the very first take and nothing more. The mom's alright, and the kid actors do a better job than the lead. Disappointing.

• The visual look. I'm pretty picky when it comes to tech accuracy in these movies, and this one falls surprisingly short. Everything we see in the film is perfect 4K with film grain, not something you'd see from a cellphone camera or a 16-year-old YouTube video (something actually shown in the film). The other Bazelevs productions weren't like this, so clearly the crew of *this one* is the issue. Every scary shot in the film is watered down with an overblown datamosh like you took all the bad parts of Unfriended: Dark Web and mashed them to a pulp. Grammatical and spelling errors plague just about every line of text, continuity errors in window locations, statuses, and the IMPORTANT SITE OF THE FILM SWITCHING BETWEEN '. ORG' and '. COM'. I can not overstate how major an oversight that is. That should be, like, the first thing you get down.

TL;DR: Don't even bother watching this. A 'Mystery Recapped' AI video could do a better job of explaining the plot than the movie itself could.

I have incredibly low standards for The Asylum, and even those are challenged by this movie. Nothing happens, and whenever something gets CLOSE to happening we witness it in tiny chunks interspersed with darkness. They tried to do Cloverfield and didn't even kinda come close.

Since everyone's reviewed this movie to death, here's a few random notes:

The whole "damaged tape" thing is not only unrealistic and plain bad looking, but I've also never seen ANYTHING like it. I've watched a hundred found footage movies (no exaggeration) and I've never seen it look like this before. What were they trying to achieve?

The audio mixing is really bad too. Some scenes were downright inaudible, and some lapel mics would really have benefited this film. Sure, it's more realistic to have all that ambient noise, but jeez it's overpowering here.

The VFX in this film is, to nobody's surprise, not good. Smoke and explosions look entirely wrong, and all the planes and helicopters move across the screen like they're being controlled by a mouse cursor. This is what happens when you try to make a mockbuster release BEFORE it's real version.