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lizzy-bennet · 5 years

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Stars in a Bottle Fandom: Doctor Who Pairing: Eleven x Clara Length: 4,000 words Warnings: None Also on Ao3

Keeping the Doctor still is like trying to catch stars in a bottle, Clara thinks. He’s something that just can’t be contained, his energy spilling over, electric and crackling and begging to be back in the sky.

Which is a bit of a problem, considering he and Clara are currently stuck in a sub, miles and miles down under the sea. (A follow up to the Series 7 episode, Cold War, which ends with the Doctor and Clara being trapped on a submarine until they reach the TARDIS at the South Pole.)

Clara stands atop a surfaced submarine, surrounded by a sea of half-sunken icebergs. There’s snow flurries fluttering softly in the air like white feathers and wind whipping against her pale blue party dress, and up in the sky, there’s a silver Ice Warrior spaceship, flying away.

But never mind that. Clara’s more interested in why, when the Doctor promised her Vegas, the TARDIS dumped them onto a sinking submarine and then disappeared, like some sort of twisted version of ding-dong-ditch. “Where’s the TARDIS? You never explained,” Clara asks him now, and the Doctor glances at her a bit shiftily, before edging away as if he’s afraid of a scolding.

“I’ve been tinkering, adjusting some settings. I’m allowed,” he tells her, adding on that last sentence a bit defensively when Clara raises an eyebrow.

“What did you do?”

“I reset the HADS.” Clara stares at him blankly. She has no idea what the HADS is, other than she’s pretty sure - no, scratch that - definitely sure he shouldn’t have been tinkering with it in the first place.

“The Hostile Action Displacement System,” he explains. “If the TARDIS thinks it’s under attack, it relocates. Which is why the TARDIS is now at...”

The Doctor’s next words come out in a low, half-mumble under his breath, like maybe if he says them quietly enough, Clara can’t hear him, and if she can’t hear him, then she can’t be mad at him.

His plan’s not working.

“Doctor,” Clara says, “where’s the TARDIS?”

”She’s at the pole.”

“Right. Not far, then.”

He wrinkles his nose, “The South Pole.”

“Ah.”

“Yes.”

“I see now.”

“You do, don’t you?”

And with that, the Doctor turns, and just like he’s simply using a deep sea Uber, he stares at the submarine captain and asks, “Can we have a lift?”

Clara sits in her small submarine cabin and sighs, rubbing her temple and closing her eyes.

By all accounts, the Doctor was handling being stuck on the sub better when its lights were flashing bright red and there was an Ice Warrior who wanted them all dead. That, at least, was dangerous, and dangerous was exciting, so dangerous was something the Doctor could handle. Boredom, he could not.

He’d already created a “disco” setting for the warning lights, invented a rather ominous looking tea kettle out of bits from a broken welding iron, and tried to increase the sub’s speed by something called “a klavnic knot.” All this eventually led to the Captain suggesting that the Doctor retire to his cabin indefinitely or be shot through the head.

The Doctor‘d had to think about it for a long minute.

But now he‘s here with her, in this too-grey, too-small of a room, and the both of them sit side-by-side on the hard edge of the narrow, metal bunk, and stare straight ahead at the windowless wall.

“You promised me Vegas,” Clara says.

“I know.” A beat, and then, “This isn’t Vegas.”

”Trust me,” the Doctor says, glowering at the wall, “I know.”

Clara laughs and then shudders, suddenly chilled. The pretty, filmy but flimsy fabric of her vintage dress she’d picked out seems like a bad choice, in hindsight, and Clara frowns ruefully as she distinctly remembers coming across a forest-green, fur-lined parka while in the TARDIS wardrobe and tossing it aside.

Why, oh, why, had she done that?

(Well, probably because she thought she was going to be partying in Vegas, and one simply did not wear parkas when one went partying in Vegas.)

Goose bumps blossom down her arms, so Clara crosses them, folding them against her chest, trying to keep warm, and then, to her surprise, she sees the Doctor’s stopped watching the wall and is looking at her now instead, frowning in that worried way of his that makes his eyes look ten-thousand-years-old.

“What?” she asks, but instead of replying, he moves, standing and slipping his arms out of the sleeves of his long, deep purple coat, and then he leans down, gently draping it over Clara’s shoulders, and she feels the warm weight of his hands lingering along her arms just for a moment as he does. “Better?” he asks.

His coat is much too big and far too long for someone as short as she is, and Clara’s overcome with the sensation that she’s a caterpillar, bundled up inside of a fabric cocoon. The ends of the coat sleeves go beyond the tips of her fingers, and the hem of it falls past her heels to brush against the floor, but the tweed is soothing and soft and wraps her in warmth, and Clara thinks she’s never worn anything cozier in her life.

”Better,” Clara agrees, as she snuggles down deeper inside. “Thank you, but don’t you need it?”

The Doctor makes a harrumphing, dismissive sort of noise, as if Clara’s made another silly suggestion again, like he did that one time she compared time streams to strawberry jam. “‘Course I don’t.”

Clara’s eyes sweep over him, taking in his woven waistcoat and white shirtsleeves. She doesn’t see how he can possibly stand it, how he’s dealing so easily with the freezing, icy air, when just the idea of giving up the coat makes her shudder again, a full body one that travels all the way down to the tips of her toes, and the Doctor reaches out to take her hand in his. “Like ice,” he murmurs, closing his other hand over hers and rubbing it, briskly but gently, trying to get some heat back into it. “Humans. Your lot has such terribly inconvenient body temperatures. Wouldn’t last a day picnicking in the Arctic without protection.”

“Who would do a thing like that, anyway?”

“The abominable snowmen, for one. Oh, they’ve got such good inner temperature, Clara, they can frolic on the ice floes for days without catching a cold. I should take you to meet their clan. Well,“ he pauses there, rethinking that. “They’ve got good temperatures, but not so much good tempers. So, on second thought, no, maybe we won’t visit them after all.”

Clara hums in agreement, listening as the Doctor continues to talk about this and that and then change his mind all within the time it takes for her to inhale, and when he’s done, she asks, “How are you not cold?” “Ah,” he says, and she can already hear so much smugness packed into the one tiny word. “Time Lord biology. I’m perfectly adaptable to both lower and higher temperatures. Gallifreyan bodies,” he informs her, “are far superior to human bodies’.”

“Seriously? Superior?”

”In every possible way.”

“How do you explain that chin, then?”

He huffs at her, and then clucks, muttering something indignantly under his breath that sounds like a mixture of ungrateful minx and shut up.

But he doesn’t let go of her hand.

Right now he’s a moving blur of long, tangled limbs as he flaps his hands and talks and plans, his mind already far beyond the confines of the sub.

“We can still go to Vegas,” he tells Clara. ”Vegas in nineteen-eighty-nine, in fact. Neon lights against the night sky. Firework shows and fireball drinks, dance floors and disco balls, and everywhere you go, people hoping for a little thing called luck.”

He plops down beside her suddenly, slinging his arm over her shoulders, “Or, alternatively, Vegas in three-thousand-thirteen, when anti-gravs are all the rage, and the Vegas strip levitates. Gives a whole new meaning to walking on air. Or, an alternative to the alternative: we don’t choose a Vegas, we choose both Vegases. Well, same Vegas, different points in time. But the question is, Clara Oswald, which one first?” Clara tilts back to peer up at him, and she feels his arm adjust around her, letting her lean back, but not letting her go.

“I think,“ she says, trying to contain a smile, “that we’d better get off the sub first.”

He huffs, “Practical spoilsport.”

Later, Clara catches the Doctor attempting to slip out the door.

“Doctor,” Clara says warningly, still wrapped up in his coat, nearly tripping on its hem as she rises to stop him, ”didn’t the Captain put you on cabin arrest?”

The Doctor flaps his hand, as if he can simply wave away her concern, and since he’s holding his sonic screwdriver as he does this, he sends its bright neon light flashing around the room.

“Clara, please,” he says, “it’s your day off, stop nannying.”

“Excuse me?” Clara raises an eyebrow. She’ll stop nannying when someone stops acting like a child that needs a nanny, thank you very much.

“I’ll skip out for just a mo.”

“Doctor, I think you should stay in here.”

“It’ll be fine.”

Clara eyes him skeptically, doubt written out across her face, but he ignores it.

Instead, he places his palm against the curve of her cheek, and leans forward to press a swift kiss to her forehead, his thumb brushing lightly along her cheekbone as he does.

“You worry too much,” he tells her blithely, and Clara thinks he means his words to be soothing, but they really just make her think he’s up to something shifty.

“I think I worry the proper amount,” Clara counters, but the Doctor’s already merrily slipping away, out of her grasp, closing the door behind him and heading down the corridor.

It’s not even a full fifteen minutes later when Clara hears the sound of the sonic and then something that sounds suspiciously like falling metal, followed by garbled shouting and the sharp click of a handgun’s safety being released. There’s silence for a second after that, and then Clara hears rapid, clumsy footsteps headed back toward the cabin.

The door opens, the Doctor scuttles inside, and Clara tries not to smirk as he quietly announces: “I think I should stay in here.”

# Clara sits with her chin resting on her hands, watching the Doctor, who’s holding the sonic screwdriver uncomfortably tight and flickering its green light as he stares up at the lightbulb in a way she doesn’t quite like. Before he can sonic it to be brighter or darker or turn it into a lava lamp or whatever the despairingly bored Time Lord is thinking of doing, Clara decides to distract him.

“Tell me about something,” she commands.

“Tell you about what?” he asks, and he sounds both curious and confused by her request, but he still hasn’t looked away from the light.

“A fact, a story, anything,” Clara says. “You’re a thousand years old. There must be something you can talk about. Space trivia. Urban myths. The first place that you visited. Last girl that you kissed.”

Now that catches his attention, Clara notices. At her last sentence, his head snaps down and he swivels around to stare at her in surprise.

“Oh,” Clara says, grinning now. “It was some kiss, then, was it?”

He opens his mouth and then shuts it, indignant.

“See,” Clara says smugly, “knew it was a snog box.”

“Shut up,” he finally says, and Clara notices a faint dusting of pink right across his cheeks.

“You blushed,” she says delightedly, and then she frowns, and he stares at her oddly, like she’s some sort of cipher he can’t figure out. And there’s something she can’t quite figure out either, because somewhere deep in the back of her mind, there’s a dark sense of déjà vu and a nagging notion that she’s said those words to him before.

But she couldn’t have.

She’s positive.

It isn’t possible.

Being trapped under the ocean must be doing things to her mind.

“Come on, tell me about her,” Clara says, pushing those hazy, bothersome thoughts away, and turning her attention back to the Doctor. “Where’d you meet this girl?”

“London,” he answers, and though he’s there beside her, he looks faraway. “It was snowing. There were snowmen. She -“ he pauses, looks over at Clara, down at her dress, and he looks like he’s halfway out of the past, halfway into the present, as he almost inaudibly says, “She wore a blue dress too.”

Clara listens to him carefully, watches intently, but there are too many layers in his voice and emotions flashing over his face for her to fully decipher. As soon as she sees sadness in his eyes, she catches a glimpse of wonder, and then past that there’s grief and determination and hope and, more than anything, the look of a man trying to solve something he just can’t understand.

“Was she nice, this girl?” Clara asks quietly.

He looks down at the floor, “Yes, yes she was. She was nice and brave and clever and far better than me.”

“Nah,” Clara teases. “That’s impossible, no one’s better than you.”

He looks up at her, “You’d be surprised.”

They sit in silence for a minute, and then Clara asks, “So what happened to her? Is she still alive?”

The Doctor stares at her, searches her eyes, and ever so softly, he says, “Sometimes I think she is.”

Clara nods, not knowing why she feels like she’s going to smile, but also going to cry. #

The Doctor’s dealing with his bored, listless energy by relentlessly rapping his hand against metal, the rise and fall of his fingers rhythmic like rain.

It’s driving Clara insane.

She’s trying to read a book she’s found in the cabin. The book’s not interesting, really. It’s something to do with Russian history and is as dusty as it is long, but there’s not much else to do, and at least it’s a novelty to think that, technically, she’s reading a book in Russian even if it’s all being translated into English for her.

But Clara can’t concentrate with that constant, infernal tapping.

“Doctor, stop,” she says sternly.

Without looking up from her book, Clara reaches her hand out and lays it on top of his, the pads of her fingers pressing against the back of his hand, pulling it down and pinning it lightly in place in-between them.

The Doctor stills under her touch, the cabin falling silent, his swirling sea of restless energy starting to calm, and then slowly, she feels his hand move beneath hers, rotating and repositioning so that they’re palm to palm, holding hands.

Amused, Clara’s eyes flicker up from her book to look at him, but he’s not looking at her. He’s staring somewhere up at where the ceiling meets the wall, and Clara wonders if he's even noticed their entwined hands at all.

Holding her hand must’ve been some sort of automatic, unconscious response, she realizes as she watches him, because he’s off lost in thought, counting the bolts in the room or mentally reciting the numbers of pi, or whatever it is bored Time Lords do.

At least he’s quiet, she thinks, and goes back to her book, her eyes taking in the faded, narrow print on the page.

She makes it a whole four paragraphs more before she senses his absent-minded energy surging again, and he starts shifting restlessly.

Then she feels the soft brush of his thumb moving up, gently ghosting across her skin.

Clara’s breath catches, caught somewhere beneath her collarbone, and there’s surprise in her eyes before slowly, she exhales, convinced it was all a mistake. But then he does it again, his thumb drifting up, absently tracing a circle on the soft, inner center of her wrist, and Clara finds she can’t concentrate, not with the way his fingers are slipping beneath the sleeve of her coat and skimming over her skin and how there’s something like a shiver starting down her spine. She’s still facing her book, but her eyes flutter shut, and she tries to decipher what exactly it is that he’s drawing out on her wrist.

At first it feels like maybe he’s mapping something, some invisible, ethereal, navigational chart that only he can see, or sketching out stars on her skin. But then she feels the pad of his thumb softly sweeping something smaller and circular over her, and it feels less like a constellation string and more like cursive, making Clara think that maybe what he’s doing is writing invisible words.

“What language is that?” Clara finally asks, and though there’s curiosity in her voice, her sentence comes out hushed, barely above a whisper. This moment is something soft, something fragile, and Clara’s afraid that simply speaking will shatter it.

The Doctor’s lips turn down in a frown, her words pulling him out of his thoughts and back into the world, and then he looks down at how their hands are intertwined in-between them and he blinks in surprise, his thumb brushing over her wrist once more before stopping, coming to rest right above her pulse-point. ”Sorry,” he says, confused and contrite. “Head in the clouds. Hadn’t realized.”

“It’s fine,” Clara answers, and she knows from where his fingers press, he can feel the fast, fluttering melody of her heartbeat, and she hopes he hasn't guessed that he’s the reason behind it. “Just tell me what it is.”

“It’s Gallifreyan,” he answers quietly. “A language so ancient it’s older than half the stars, and every bit as beautiful.”

Clara’s lips curve up at the corners, and her eyes flicker up to his.

“Show me,” she says.

He shrugs, “No pen and paper. No chalk either. Not even a tiny, table-top zen garden with a tiny rake to write in the sand with. This cabin is surprisingly lacking in resources.”

“Come on, Doctor,” Clara says, and she tugs him closer and then holds out her hand, palm up. “Just show me how you write it, I’d like to see.”

The Doctor hesitates, looking torn, but then, ever so slowly, his hand comes forward, and she watches as his finger moves in delicate, intricate curves, lightly tracing words onto her palm.

“What does that mean?” Clara asks, wondering what he’s spelled across her skin. He laughs, ducks his head, and says:

“It means Impossible Girl.” # Clara’s aware that they’re sitting on a bunk and that there’s a pillow somewhere behind her, but she can’t be bothered to look for it, not when there’s a perfectly good Time Lord next to her to lean against instead. The aforementioned Time Lord is finally sitting contented and still, having taken over her book, the discussion of ancient Russian history fascinating him much more than it did her (likely, Clara thinks, because he was actually there), so she scoots over, resting her head on his shoulder.

“Tired,” she says, yawning.

“Staring at a wall all day can be draining,” he says wisely.

“What about you? You don’t look tired at all.”

“I don’t sleep,” he says, turning another page of his book.

“Not ever?” Clara asks, not too sleepy to not be skeptical.

“Well, fine. Sometimes,” he amends. “I sleep sometimes.”

“Like when?”

“Like when people aren’t pestering me,” he says, and Clara swats his arm. ”I don’t need that much sleep, Time Lord biology is -“

“Superior in every way, yes, you've mentioned that.”

He looks up from his book and glances down at her, “Do you need the bunk? I can stand.” Clara makes a small noise of disagreement. The smooth cotton of his shirt feels soft against her cheek, and he’s much more comfortable than she ever would have guessed, what with his gangly, flailing limbs.

Besides, he’d promised her Vegas and landed her here instead. The least he could do was sit still and be a pillow. “Don’t move,” she says, curling in against him.

“Clara,” he says lightly, and there’s amusement and terror and terrible fondness in his eyes as he watches her nuzzle her face against his waistcoat. “I don’t think -“

But he’s too late, Clara’s already gotten comfortable and is nestled into his side, holding him in place and firmly shutting her eyes.

“All right, you can stay,” he says, as if he actually has a choice in the matter. “But it’s not happening again. I’m no one’s personal pillow.” “More like a personal space heater,” Clara mumbles saucily, half-asleep already.

”Watch it,” he warns, trying his very best to sound scolding and indignant, but Clara merely hums contentedly in response.

And as the soft tendrils of sleep overtake her, she feels his fingers gently running through her hair, and with both laughter and affection in his voice, he whispers, “Sleep well, Impossible Girl.”

Later, when Clara wakes up and rubs the sleep from her eyes, she finds her head‘s still curved against the crook of his neck, and her hand’s moved to rest right in the middle of his chest, in the center space between his two hearts, and she can feel their tandem tempo, beating out a rhythm beneath her fingers.

And the Doctor, well, he’s sleeping from what Clara can tell. His eyes are shut and he’s slumped over, half-sitting, half-sinking against the wall, and his left arm’s looped around her shoulders.

One side of Clara’s lips twitch up into a smile, and as if he can somehow sense her rising laughter, the Doctor wakes up, and he opens one eye, glancing at her with sleepy suspicion.

“Time Lords don’t sleep, hmm?” Clara can’t resist saying. “Superior biology.”

“Got bored,” he grouses, sitting and shifting them up. “There was nothing to do, not with you curled up on me like some sort of sleepy, clingy cat. Incredibly boring. Completely boring. Body shut down as a defense mechanism against the lack of mental stimuli, that’s what it was.”

Clara nods solemnly, “Of course.”

“Shut up,” he grumps, but she swears she sees a hint of pale pink on his cheeks.

They’ve just gotten news that they’re surfacing and that they’ll soon be back with the TARDIS, and giddy with excitement, the Doctor takes out a giant, old map he’s found tucked under the bunk and tacks it up, spreading its paper green mountains and blue paper seas over the dull grey metal wall.

“Close your eyes, Clara,” he says, a delighted grin on his face, and when she does, she feels his hands wrap around her shoulders, and she laughs as he gently spins her in place.

“It’ll be just like pin the tail on the donkey, except better. Because any place your hand lands on the map, we’ll go,” he says, offering her the world as he twirls her around. “North or South, East or West, anywhere and everywhere, whenever you want.”

Finally, he stops spinning, positioning Clara in what she assumes is the space in front of the map. With her eyes still shut, she feels him lean down over her shoulder, and there’s a shiver that goes down her spine as his face falls next to her ear and he whispers, “All you have to do is point.”

So Clara points, her hand connecting with paper, and when she opens them, she finds the pad of her finger directly over a country.

“Peru,” she says, reading what she’s landed on and smiling.

“Peru,” he echoes excitedly. “Good choice, Clara. Amazon rainforests and Andes Mountains and ancient Incan cities. Frogs and fog oases and cactuses and cloud-forest slopes.” And then he turns to her, his eyes glittering as he grins and says, “How would you like to be beside Hiram Bingham when he discovers Machu Picchu?”

And Clara grins back, because there’s a whole wide world waiting for them outside of this sub, and adventure’s only a breath away, and how lucky is she, to have this magic, mad, impossible man offering her the universe in the palm of his hand?

So, laughing, she reaches out for his hand and says, “Doctor, any point in time will do, as long as it’s with you.”

And as his fingers close around hers, he says:

“Likewise, Clara Oswald, likewise.”

And she knows it’s true.

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thegloober · 6 years

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30 Minutes on: “Searching”

by Matt Zoller Seitz

September 16, 2018 |

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“Searching” is one of the best films of 2018, and a major leap forward for both the thriller genre and the presence of Asian-Americans in movies. John Cho (“Star Trek,” “Columbus“) stars as David Kim, a father trying to locate his daughter Margot (Michelle La), who disappeared on a Friday night when she was supposed to be at piano practice. You’ve seen this kind of movie before, but it’s the combination of cultural specificity and storytelling skill that sets it apart. (Note: There are going to be spoilers in this piece, so if you haven’t already seen the movie, you should do so and finish this later.)

The totality of “Searching” is presented as if it were drawn from the contents of desktop computers and iPhones—juxtaposing, for instance, two sides of a FaceTime call with phone logs, satellite maps, open windows playing YouTube videos, etc. Other films have tried to tell a story this way (“Unfriended” is one example, though it’s nowhere near as clever as this movie, or as knowledgable about the tech it shows us). But none have done as fine a job of integrating the emotional and narrative content of a story with all the visual and sonic bells and whistles, so that it all plays as a seamless whole and feels organic and true to how we live now.

Consider the prologue, which takes us through the death of David’s wife and Margot’s mother Pamela (Sara Sohn) from cancer. It’s a little masterpiece of narrative compression that deserves favorable comparison with the opening of Pixar’s “Up,” not just because of its ability to elicit tears, but because it compresses a feature film’s worth of emotional power into a few fleet minutes without making you feel as if the movie had rushed you through anything important. I can’t think of another recent sequence that better shows how our emotions are intertwined with the boringly ordinary digital tasks we perform all day, every day. Notice, for instance, how David moves videos that will have enormous nostalgic value later into specific folders to make them easier to find (which immediately communicate how important they are to him, and how important that will be to the movie). Also impressive is the way the film treats the simple act of scheduling events (like Pamela coming home from the hospital) as indicators of the family’s fears and dreams, and devices for generating empathy as well as suspense (every time David moves the homecoming date, we can feel our stomachs tighten up a bit more, anticipating the worst).

As directed by Aneesh Chaganty and cowritten by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian, “Searching” makes a statement about how life is lived, and how movies are lagging behind in rarely depicting that life, all without seeming to make a statement. Everything shown in the movie is something we see everyday on a laptop or phone or iPad screen, but seeing it blown up to feature film dimensions (I recommend seeing “Searching” in a theater if possible) puts the data in a new context, makes us appreciate textures we’d otherwise take for granted, and finds poetry and mystery in what we’d ordinarily think of as a technical limitations (when Chaganty zooms or crops into a wide shot of people who are pictured from head to toe, and the fuzzy borders of their heads and bodies becomes painterly). It’s analogous to the way David pores through all the available information he has in order to find clues and answers, only to keep running up against the limitations of what facts alone can tell him. This happens whenever you’re trying to solve a mystery involving someone you know. Sometimes you get a piece of data that feels relevant and useful, but there are still limits to what it can tell you.

I love the way the movie alternates guiding the eye and letting you look where you want. A lot of the time when David is anxiously talking to the detective on the case, Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing), to his brother Peter (Joseph Lee), or to the various teenaged classmates and acquaintances who knew his daughter far less well than he thought, we have to decide where onscreen to look. The movie always takes care to guide you when it’s crucial to see a particular thing at a particular moment; but a lot of the time you find yourself looking somewhere other than wherever David is looking; when he’s having a video chat with Rosemary, you might be looking at a window full of folders, and wondering if the answers that would crack the the case are contained in one that the hero hasn’t dug through yet. There’s also a subtle undercurrent of social satire in the images that minor characters post of themselves (like the shot of the bad boy Derek exhaling clouds of pot smoke) as well as the late sequence where characters who barely knew Margot and couldn’t be bothered to get to know her during the darkest period of her life suddenly pretend that they were all her best friend and are devastated by her disappearance. (The bleakly comedic TBS series “Search Party” is also very good about satirizing the performative grief of social media users.)

Equally notable is the way “Searching” lets its main family be culturally specific without the movie becoming a meditation on what it means to be Korean-American, to the exclusion of all else. This is not to dismiss films that are specifically about that (there should be many more of them than there currently are), but to point out one of the unfortunate pitfalls of casting genre films with predominantly nonwhite casts: even if the movie isn’t meant as a referendum on the state of a particular culture, ethnicity or race, it gets read that way by a predominately white American audiences and critics, often inappropriately. “Searching” hits a sweet spot between being a film with Korean-Americans in lead roles and caring very deeply about them as Korean-Americans rather that presenting them as “raceless,” while functioning as very effective thriller from start to finish.

Many plot elements, from the way that Margot and her mother bonded over piano to the way Peter calls up David for help with a “kimchi gumbo” recipe, will strike specific emotional notes for Korean and Korean-American viewers. But these are always adjacent to the main function of a scene, which is to flesh out the characters and drive the plot forward. Notice, for instance, how the piano stuff pays off at the end, with a revelation of why Margot stopped going to the lessons after her mother’s death, and how the discussion of the kimchi recipe pays off what had originally seemed like a purely comedic beat: David disapprovingly noticing Peter’s marijuana buds in a jar sitting in plain view on the counter.

“Searching” is a formally playful film that’s constantly thinking about how to make all the media it shows us feel organic and not too fussed over, while also constantly trying to come up with ways to arrange the material that will make it more traditionally “cinematic.” One of my favorite examples is the scene where David goes over to Peter’s apartment to confront him, surreptitiously planting tiny cameras in three locations to record incriminating information. One of the angles lets us see David through the open front door of Peter’s apartment, checking the feed of all three hidden cameras on a laptop in his car—a deep focus composition worthy of Orson Welles or John Frankenheimer. As the brothers move through various rooms, the director slides from one window to the next, tracking their motions in a way that’s elegant and exciting, and that feels as he’s “panning” through a single set with a film camera on a tripod, even though he’s moving across boxes on a flat computer screen. When the brothers struggle, one of the cameras falls from its original position and lands on the floor pointing up. When David sits on a chair in that shot, the low, ominous angle is as close to a classic film noir image as “Searching” has given us. It’s wonderfully correct for that moment in the story, and delightful for how it manages to be extremely showy while acting as if that’s just where the camera happened to fall.

There are even moments where the movie captures the intellectual and emotional sensation of being online when you’re stressed out. The movie watches the cursor move across the screen, pause over two option buttons, and then wait before deciding whether to stay online or log off, open this folder as opposed to that one, or zoom in on an image that we thought David had already studied and absorbed. The many scenes that follow along as David tries to gain access to important information by fishing through his late wife’s accounts do double duty as plot exposition and character development, filling in pieces of the mystery of Margot’s private life while showing us how disconnected David was from all of that. (His wife obviously ran the domestic sphere.)

It’s rare to see a commercial film that’s this suspenseful and emotionally involving but that also feels electrifyingly new. This one pulled me in from frame one and never let go, and delivered all the satisfactions I wanted from a mystery-suspense film while also giving me lots to think about, purely through its decision of how to tell the story. I have no idea how well “Searching” is going to hold up in twenty or even five years; given the rapid pace of technological change, it seems possible that at lot of the software and devices presented here will seem quaint. But it’s still fun to see moviemakers treating everyday rituals that so many films ignore as being integral to its story, and thinking about how the most intimate aspects of life have become digitized and made virtual, and what that means for the species.

Previous Article: 30 Minutes on: “The Meg”

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The post 30 Minutes on: “Searching” was shared from BlogHyped.com.

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