The tense, emotional thriller Search 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 comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
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 genre.
At Sundance, the filmmaker is taking his next big swing at the format with Search, starring Star Trek‘s John Cho and Will & Grace‘s Debra…
