Searching: You'll Need to Take a Seat to Unravel That Twisty Ending

Updated on 9/13/2018 at 1:05 PM

It's been a fantastic year for Asian-Americans in the movie industry, with the arrival of sweet romantic comedies such as Crazy Rich Asians and To All the Boys I've Loved Before. But romance isn't the only genre where we're seeing excellent work by Asian actors. Searching, one of the smartest thrillers of this year, features perhaps the biggest Asian-American lead of our generation: John Cho, who you might know from the stoner comedy Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

Cho plays David, a Silicon Valley father who uses the internet and social media to track down his missing 16-year-old daughter Margot. The distraught dad enlists the help of his brother, Peter, and the lead detective on his daughter's case, Rosemary Vick. Under Aneesh Chaganty's adroit directing, Searching plays out in a novel and refreshing way. Viewers experience the entire film through social media messages, FaceTime calls, and news footage. Given its inventive style, Searching absolutely features a twist ending.

It's pretty mind-boggling how everything goes down in the third act of the movie. Here's a step-by-step account of the crazy ending to help you connect the logical dots of Searching's central mystery. Spoilers, of course, lie ahead.

David's Realization

Just before the climax of the movie, Randy Cartoff, an ex-convict who tapes a live confession, admits to hurting and killing Margot before he kills himself. David is devastated.
Preparing for Margot's funeral, David comes across an ad from MemorialOne, a funeral casting service. The ad features the same person who appears in the profile picture of the YouCast user fish_n_chips. Earlier in David's investigations, he learns that Margot has become incredibly friendly with this girl.
Bubbling with suspicion, David uses a Google image search to track down the stock model used in both of these images, who has no clue about Margot's investigation. While trying to contact Detective Rosemary Vick about his findings, he learns from a colleague that the detective volunteered to take on Margot's case from the very beginning. Very suspicious indeed.
David looks up Rosemary's profiles online, coming across an earlier article about her police outreach efforts, in which the main image features her with Cartoff, the purported killer. David relays his suspicions to other detectives, who then arrest the detective at Margot's vigil.

The Truth

We see Detective Vick's taped confession. She's not so much an evil mastermind as she is a really desperate parent. YouCast user fish_n_chips turns out to be none other than her son Robert, who harbors a crush on Margot.
Not wanting to use his real identity, Robert pretends to be a waitressing student named Hannah to talk to Margot.
Hannah tells Margot that she has to leave school in order to pay for her mother's cancer treatment (appealing to the young girl herself, whose mother died from lymphoma). Margot Venmos Hannah $2,500, which she's been saving from her skipped piano lessons. Robert feels guilty about keeping the money, so he plans to meet up with her one night at Barbosa Lake to give back the full amount in cash.
When he suddenly enters her car, Margot is alarmed and tries to fight him. Robert ends up accidentally pushing her down a ravine. He freaks out and calls his mother.

Detective Vick's Plan

Rosemary, like Olivia Pope, has things handled. Long before volunteering to be the lead detective on the case, she arrives at the crime scene to help her son. She then tries to get rid of Margot's car in the lake, but David pinpoints it as an important location early in the case, which leads to the vehicle being found. The detective also creates a false ID for Margot that serves as a fake lead in the investigation.
Then, there's the script that Rosemary feeds Cartoff. She gives him drugs and has him confess to killing Margot in his suicide tape to keep the
case neat and tidy.
Under interrogation, Detective Vick assumes all responsibility, reiterating again and again that she was afraid of what would happen to Robert in prison. Robert, of course, gets arrested anyway.

Searching for Margot

Even if Margot survived the fall, she likely would have succumbed to dehydration. But, there's a recent rainstorm, which meant that she could have survived.
Through breaking news coverage, we see authorities trying to recover Margot's body from the ravine at Barbosa Lake. It doesn't look good — as the newscaster reiterates over and over — we don't know her status as they pull her up from the crane. Emergency services immediately work on her.

Shutting Down

Despite all of the creepy tension that looms in the movie, Searching ends on a positive, heck, even heartwarming note. We see Margot refreshing a page on her computer for an application that she submits to a prestigious piano school.
In an iMessage window, Margot chats with her dad. They joke around as David sends her a picture of them cheesing together at her school, presumably as she's recovering from the ravine fall. David tells her that he's proud of her and that her late mother would be too.
Margot changes the background of her computer to the picture of them together. She then shuts down the computer. It's not quite a cinematic wide shot or dramatic fade to black, but it hit a familiar beat and made us feel fuzzy inside.

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