Searching

**Searching** is a 2018 film starring John Cho and Debra Messing, directed by Aneesh Chaganty, written by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian and produced by Timur Bekmambetov, Ohanian, Natalie Qasabian and Adam Sidman.

The film was a financial success as it generated a profit of $35 million.

## Plot

David Kim lives in San Jose, California with his daughter Margot. His wife Pamela was diagnosed with lymphoma and died before Margot entered high school. One day, Margot goes missing. David calls her piano instructor but is informed that she cancelled her lessons six months prior. He discovers that she was pocketing the money for the lessons and transferred it to a now-deleted Venmo account. He calls the police and the case is assigned to Detective Rosemary Vick. Accessing Margot's accounts, David learns that she had become a loner since Pamela's death. Vick reports that Margot made a fake ID and shows traffic camera footage of her car outside of the city, suggesting she may have run away.

David, unconvinced, discovers that Margot used to talk with a young woman called "fish\_n\_chips". Vick reports back that fish\_n\_chips is innocent, having been sighted in Pittsburgh at the time of the disappearance. From Margot's Tumblr, David finds that she frequently visited Barbosa Lake, which is near the highway she was last seen. At the lake, he finds her Pokémon keychain on the ground. The police locate her car underwater. Her body is not inside, but there is an envelope containing the piano money.

David visits a site that displays the crime scene photographs and notices his brother Peter's jacket. He then discovers text messages between Margot and Peter, hinting that they might have had an incestuous relationship. When he confronts Peter, the latter explains that they were only smoking marijuana and confiding in each other. He chastises David for failing to notice his daughter was depressed. Vick tells him that an ex-convict named Randy Cartoff confessed to raping and killing Margot before committing suicide.

An empty-casket funeral is arranged for Margot. David notices that the funeral website's stock photograph features the same woman as fish\_n\_chips’s profile picture. He contacts the woman and discovers that she is a stock model who does not know Margot and that the police never called her. Attempting to report this to Vick, he instead reaches a dispatcher who reveals that Vick volunteered to take the case and was not assigned to it as she had claimed. He googles Vick and finds that she knew Cartoff through a volunteer program for ex-convicts. He reports this to the sheriff and Vick is arrested.

Vick agrees to confess in exchange for leniency for her son Robert, who was using the alias fish\_n\_chips to get close to Margot because he had a crush on her. Margot sent Robert the money thinking he was a working-class girl whose mother was in the hospital. Robert felt guilty and wanted to give the money back. When he surprised Margot by getting into her car while she was smoking, she ran, and in the scuffle, Robert accidentally pushed her off a cliff into a 50-foot-deep ravine. Vick decided to cover up the incident, pushing the car into the lake. She then turned Cartoff into a fall guy and killed him.

David asks Vick where Margot's body is, and she tells him that even if Margot had survived the fall, she could not have lived five days without water. David tells the police to turn around, pointing out that the storm that occurred on the third day of the search would have provided Margot with water. Sure enough, the rescue crew discovers Margot injured but alive.

Two years later, Margot has applied for college to major in piano. David tells her that Pamela would have been proud of her.