111 min | PG-13 | January 20, 2023 | Screen Gems
June Allen’s mother flies to Colombia for a vacation and vanishes. June has never left her bedroom, but she has a laptop, a dead woman’s passwords, and a willingness to break into every account she can reach. Turns out the kid raised on screens is the only one who knows how to find someone who lives on them.
June Allen is a teenager who lives online. Her mother flies to Colombia with a new boyfriend and never comes back. June tries to find her using the only tools she trusts. Those tools are her laptop, her phone, and every login and location service she can crack. The film is a sequel to Searching, and it runs the same trick. It builds an entire thriller inside the screens we already stare at all day.
Storm Reid plays June as a girl who weaponizes her fluency with technology before she understands what she is uncovering. Reid spends most of the film alone in frame, reacting to text on a monitor, and she carries the suspense through micro-expressions and the speed of her typing. She makes the panic legible without a single confidant in the room. Joaquim de Almeida plays Javi, a TaskRabbit worker June hires in Colombia to be her hands on the ground. He brings warmth to a man reduced to a video feed. Nia Long plays the mother Grace with a controlled distance that the film slowly explains.
Directors Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick edited the first film, and that editing background defines this one. The entire movie unfolds across browser tabs, FaceTime windows, security cameras, and Ring doorbells, and the directors cut between these sources to control where the eye lands. They hide information at the edges of cluttered desktops and trust the audience to scan for it. A reflection in a webcam or an unread notification carries plot weight that dialogue never states. The screenlife format could be a gimmick. Johnson and Merrick treat it as a grammar with its own rules for tension and reveal.
This is a thriller about how much of a life leaves a digital trail and how that trail lies as often as it tells the truth. June solves the mystery by trusting data, and the film keeps showing her that data omits the things that matter most. The plotting stacks reversals faster than it should be able to sustain, and the last act asks for more belief than the setup earns. The construction holds anyway because the form and the story are the same idea. We watch a girl try to know her mother through screens and learn that screens were never going to be enough.