Film / Searching

No one is lost without a trace.

Detective Vick: One: after study session, Margot didn't return home. Two: she didn't attend school on Friday. And three: she's been transferring funds for the last six months. We'll handle the ground investigation, but as a parent, you can help us with who your daughter talks to. Is that something you can do?
David Kim: Yes.

Searching is a 2018 thriller film directed by Aneesh Chaganty from a script he co-wrote with Sev Ohanian. It stars John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, and Joseph Lee.

David Kim (Cho) finds that his daughter Margot (La) has not returned from a study group session, and after nearly a whole day of not hearing from her, he begins to worry and calls the police. With the help of Detective Rosemary Vick (Messing), David goes through any means possible to find out what happened to Margot.

The film is notable for being told from the POV of laptop and phone screens, much like Unfriended's take on the found footage genre did in 2014 (though this film is by a totally different production team).

A sequel, called Missing, was released in January 2023. Chaganty returns as a producer, but the film does not feature the characters or story of the first film (except as a fake Netflix documentary episode shown in-universe), instead sharing the same style.

Due to the mystery elements of the plot, a lot of these trope names reveal significant information about the plot by themselves. Please proceed with caution.

Previews: Trailer 1, Trailer 2.

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Searching contains examples of:

• 555: The phone numbers David finds online all start with 555.
• Accidental Murder: According to Vick, Margot and her son went into a quarrel and he pushed her accidentally over the cliff. Subverted, when it turns out, Margot survived the fall down the ravine.
• An Aesop:
  • Grief is hard to deal with, but it's important to not let one's mourning for lost loved ones overshadow one's relationships with still-living ones. In particular, the death of someone you love doesn't only affect you, and reaching out to others can be a key element of processing a shared tragedy.
  • Be careful about trusting people online if you don't know them in real life, and don't take anything online as gospel. What appears as compassionate online may actually be predatory.
• Anti-Villain: Detective Vick, who, despite deceiving David and the public for days and killing a completely innocent person and later framing him, was doing it to protect her son from prison.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Even while dying of lymphoma, Pam looks pretty much the same, albeit pale and weak.
  • Margot also looks okay when she's rescued from the ravine, despite repeated warnings that she may look gruesome. This is even more so a couple of months later when, despite being in a wheelchair from the injuries she sustained, she looks very healthy and pretty much the same as she did before disappearing and being stuck in a ravine for a week.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Abigail, Margot's classmate who outright tells David she only invited Margot to the study group session so that Abigail can get into Berkeley. After Margot is reported missing, she makes a phony tearful video in which she says Margot was her best friend.
  • Detective Rosemary Vick, who intentionally deceives David and the public, frames a reformed criminal for Margot's supposed rape and murder, kills said reformed criminal and disguises his murder as a suicide to tie up all loose ends and close the case prematurely, and is ready to leave Margot to die at the bottom of a cliff, just so she can prevent her son (a Stalker with a Crush responsible for Margot's disappearance) from ending up in jail.
• Bookends:
  • Margot and David's pictures together on the first day of school. They take another one near the very end when Margot recovers and goes back to high school.
  • Early on, David tries to text Margot that her mother would have been proud of her for trying to achieve her goal, but he deletes it, as he is afraid to talk about the matter of his wife's death. David follows through on telling her at the very end after they are reunited that her mother would be proud of her now.
• Cannot Spit It Out: A non-romantic version. Throughout the film, it is shown that David is unable to have an honest talk with Margot about Pamela, since the trauma of her recent death is still too painful for him. Whenever he tries to broach the subject, he retreats, leaves things unsaid or changes the subject. This leaves Margot unable to process her own grief, which causes her to abandon her piano classes (pianos remind her of her mother), confide in her uncle Peter instead and start smoking weed as a coping mechanism against the pain. Peter eventually calls out David for being so caught up in his grief that he neglected his daughter's well-being. David gets over it by the time of the epilogue, finally being able to tell Margot that her mother would be proud of her.
• Catfishing:Vick's son uses a stock photo of a young woman to get close to Margot on a chat service.
• Chekhov's Gun: The rainstorm that puts a stop to the second day of the search for Margot ends up saving her life. She would have died of dehydration at the bottom of the cliff otherwise, but the rainstorm gave her enough water to stave off the dehydration until her father and a rescue team could find her.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • User fish_n_chips on YouCast, who frequently texts with Margot and shares many personal info with her. At first, she seems to be uninvolved in the case, until David finds out that the girl who appears in the advertisement for the MemorialOne website is the same person as the girl in fish_n_chips' profile picture. Then it turns out the girl who appears in both pictures is actually a stock photo model edited from the internet. The girl herself actually has nothing to do with it. But the account itself belongs to Detective Vick's son Robert, who makes the fake account to try to get close to Margot because he likes her.
  • Vick's son, Robert, also counts. He appears for less than a minute when he opens the door while Vick is Skyping with David, and it turns out he was catfishing Margot, attacked her, and pushed her into the ravine.
  • One of the reformed criminals Vick enlisted to be a volunteer construction worker that appeared in the photo that David looks up to see if Vick is trustworthy, who turns out to be the same person as the supposed murderer of Margot. This leads David to suspect that Vick is up to no good.
• Contrived Coincidence: The stock photography model used by MemorialOne just happens to be the exact same model used by fish_n_chips to catfish Margot.
• Convenient Photograph:
  • David sees a photograph that shows Margot in the background Eating Lunch Alone.
  • Less so the photograph itself, but its placement. David just happens to see the same stock photograph on MemorialOne.
• Cool Uncle: Peter who hangs out and smokes weed with his niece, helping her open up about her feelings after her mother's death. It later becomes clear that he's making her mother's kimchi recipe because Margot was coming over.
• Cop/Criminal Family: Vick is a highly decorated detective, while her son Robert is a teenage fraudster who's always in trouble. And he stalked and attacked Margot, only not killing her through a stroke of luck. And then Vick used her police powers to direct away from him as much as possible.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Between the dozens of death threat emails David got, one of them is from Sev Ohanian, the movie's co-writer and co-producer, and explains the ending of the movie: "My Theory - It's obvious what happened: Your daughter was catfished by this Fish_N_Chips character - who is no doubt the son of"
  • In the end, we see a list of users of the laptop chat application Margo uses two years after the incident. One of the users is the film's producer Timur Bekmambetov, and other producers who are involved.
• Creepy Uncle: David thinks that his brother is this, but it's subverted - Peter is actually a Cool Uncle, and he's just smoking weed with Margot. It's actually a Red Herring.
• Detective Mole: Margot's disappearance turns out to be the work of Rosemary Vick, the detective helping David solve the case, and her son Robert. While Robert was the one responsible for Margot's fall down the ravine, it was Rosemary who was the true villain, wasting no time in helping her son cover it up, including tampering with evidence, engineering a False Confession from an ex-con (and then killing him and making it look like a suicide), and attempting to divert Margot's father David with false leads.
• Discarded, Not Delivered: The film uses this for great effect, where characters will type out what they really want to say, but delete it and replace it with something else.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child: David realizes how estranged he and Margot have become as he doesn't know anything about her after she goes missing.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The way Vick's son is presented in the movie, along with the wording of Vick's testimony at the end of the movie, seem to have been written in ways that bring to mind the Brock Turner case, specifically in how the parents of a child who attempt to keep their children out of jail because they are "special".
• Double-Meaning Title: Searching both refers to David's frantic search for Margot and his main method of investigation: by searching through the social networks, and discovering who his daughter really is in the process.
• Dramatic Irony: As David begins to lay into his brother with an accusation of harming Margot, he ignores his phone... which buzzes with Detective Vick repeatedly trying to tell him the "real" culprit had been apprehended.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After all the hell that David goes through to find Margot, she is found alive and the two are reunited.
• Eating Lunch Alone: Margot, who was revealed to be lonely and kept a distance from her friends, ate lunch alone in the cafeteria every day, proven with photo evidence.
• Embarrassing Alibi: David has a hard time getting bad-boy Derek to come forward with his alibi for the night in question. When pressed further, Derek reveals that he went to a Justin Bieber concert.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • David's first interaction with his daughter includes him typing out a message broaching the subject of her late mother, but deleting it. This establishes David's primary flaw of not addressing the uncomfortable subject of the death in their family.
  • When David first meets Detective Vick, he does a quick Google search of her, revealing that she's a decorated officer, a loving mother and a volunteer. The latter two also establish that she'll do anything for her son and connect her to the "culprit" who gets pinned with Margot's murder.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Vick stating that there was no way for Margot to have survived for the past 5 days makes David remember the rainstorm that stopped the investigation three days prior, saving her life.
• Fake–Real Turn: Detective Vick, upon learning her son was swindling his neighbors for donations to a fake charity, rather than reveal that it was fake, instead founded the charity herself to avoid Robert's reputation being ruined.
• False Confession: Vick forces a former inmate to confess to killing Margot to throw suspicion off of her and Robert.
• False Friend: Turns out two of Margot's classmates that she still keeps on her Facebook friends list and contact information, Abigail and Derek Ellis, are this. The former was just using Margot to get to U.C. Berkeley as she faked being a best friend, while the latter was just sexually harassing her on social media and exploiting her disappearance for his own petty ends. Margot has no idea about what either of them really are. By the time of the epilogue, however, she seems to have learned better and she doesn't want to talk to them anymore.
• Father's Quest: This movie chronicles a determined father's quest to find his missing teen daughter through technology such as social media.
• Fictional Social Network: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all shown, but the streaming site YouCast appears to be based on the real site YouNow.
• Foil: David and Detective Vick, both of whom are a Papa Wolf and Mama Bear respectively and are willing to do anything to protect their kids. Vick goes off the deep end in doing so however, but David was pretty close to doing so himself, accusing his own brother of possibly preying on Margot and violently assaulting a teenager just for making an admittedly tasteless joke about Margot's disappearance. And while David barely knows anything about his daughter, Vick knows her son all too well.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: David and Peter Kim are brothers who are starkly different from each other. David is responsible, hardworking, and stern, while Peter is a carefree, lackadaisical pothead. Then it's zigzagged when David is driven to erratic behavior and Peter is the one trying to rein him in. It also quickly becomes evident that David didn't actually know what was happening in his daughter's life, and she instead went to Peter to discuss her feelings. Peter ultimately calls his brother out for failing to actually give his daughter what she needs.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The news articles David pulls up at the beginning foreshadow upcoming events, such as a weather report on an upcoming storm, and a story about how a hiker was lost for nine days before being found by a search party.
  • David and Peter's FaceTime call is interrupted by a doorbell, followed by Peter quickly and awkwardly hanging up. This scene has more significance later on when David finds text messages between Margot and Peter, leading the audience to think Peter had something to do with Margot's disappearance. It turns out that Peter was a Red Herring, and that the interruption was most likely Margot coming over to get high with him.
  • Vick tells David about how she once covered for her son when he made up a fake charity to scam people out of their money, showing how willing she is to protect him. She covers for him again after he's responsible for Margot's disappearance.
  • The weed David notices during his call with his brother is a clue that the Big Secret the brother and Margot were having was not actually sexual.
  • A picture early on in the film identifies Margot's school mascot as the Catfish. The climax of the movie involves revealing that the attacker created a false online persona to get closer to Margot, an act otherwise known as catfishing.
  • Pay very close attention when David calls Detective Vick about Margot's connection to Barbosa Lake. Vick brings it up before David does, and he never catches this error on her part.
  • Furthermore, every time we see Robert in person prior to the reveal, it's when he's anxiously checking in on his mom when she's yelling about the case. Why would a detective's son interrupt his mom constantly during frantic/heated work calls? Well, he knows that the case is actually about him, and he can't bear not to know what's unfolding in the moment.
  • When David goes through Pam's old files on Margot's grade school friends, one of them is of a boy named Robbie Abolt who has a crush on Margot. Robert is Detective Vick's son, and has been stalking Margot for years and is responsible for her disappearance. Pam's notes also mention that his mother is in the SVPD, and that she's divorced, which is why his last name in the file is not Vick.
  • When David first logs into YouCast, fish_n_chips logs in almost immediately, and then just as quickly logs off. This is Robbie Abolt panicking about seeing the supposedly dead Margot online, and then logging off. If fish_n_chips had just been an unrelated online friend of Margot's, you might expect her to ask David who he is. When David browses Margot's cast history, the first time fish_n_chips interacts with Margot, she doesn't have a profile picture. This is because he created the false identity after his first interaction with her.
  • Margot states her favorite Pokémon is Uxie, which lives in a lake. Now, where was Margot found again? By a lake.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Between the dozens of death threat emails David got, one of them is from Sev Ohanian, the movie's co-writer and co-producer, and explains the ending of the movie: "My Theory - It's obvious what happened: Your daughter was catfished by this Fish_N_Chips character - who is no doubt the son of"
  • Interestingly enough, there appears to be an Alien Invasion subplot occurring while David is searching for his daughter, but it's only shown in news articles and on the margins, and has nothing to do with the overall plot so you have to pay very close attention to spot its trace elements.
• From the Mouths of Babes: The prologue shows young Margot googling "what is entercourse".
• G.I.R.L.: fish_n_chips is actually a guy. Particularly, he's Robbie Abolt, Detective Vick's son.
• Happier Home Movie: During his harddrive search, David comes across a video of young Margot and her mother cooking. He is touched by it but then hides the clip from future search results.
• Hate Sink: Margot's classmate Derek Ellis is an unrelenting jackass who spams her pictures with crude comments and then has the audacity to joke about her being with him because he says he's her pimp.
• Heroic BSoD: David collapses to the floor sobbing and wailing uncontrollably when the call comes in that the suspect was found and confessed to murdering Margot.
• Idiot Ball: Somehow, with the extensive lengths of scouring he goes to, David didn't think to try using Find My iPhone.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: It's easy to miss, because even David never realizes it, but when he calls Detective Vick in the middle of the night to tell her about Margot's connection to Barbosa Lake, one of the first things out of her mouth is "Is she at the lake?" without any suggestion on his part that a lake was involved.
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: David flips out on Derek at a movie theater after seeing his gross comments online. The fight gets uploaded to YouTube, where David is labeled "Crazy Dad."
• Internet Counterattack: David is subjected to this after his daughter's disappearance hits the news.
• Internet Safety Aesop: The moral and theme of the entire story are that you shouldn't trust the people you meet online and there are some real-life consequences to what you do online.
• Internet Stalking: A father tries to find his missing daughter by searching and retracing her internet activity.
• In-Universe Camera: A slight variation. Every single shot in the movie is done from the perspective of a screen of some kind. Almost all of the camera shots were seemingly taken from webcams and phone cameras, with the remainder from news reports viewed on a computer (and one police interrogation room camera).
• Ironic Juxtaposition: The shot of Margot frantically calling David multiple times in the middle of the night while his desktop's colorfully relaxing screensaver dances in the background.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: David's brother Peter, who's a pothead and shares weed with his teenage niece behind her father's back. But he does so to help her deal with the pain of her mother's death, and to help her open up about her feelings. She's clearly more comfortable talking to him about her feelings and choices than her father, and whether or not his actions were well-advised, they were clearly driven by genuine concern.
• Knight Templar Parent: David Kim is accused of being this by people on social networks after his personal investigation of Margot's case gone too aggressive. Detective Vick herself is also revealed to be one. She will stop at nothing to prevent her son from going to prison, even if it means letting an innocent child die and framing a reformed criminal for the crime he didn't commit and possibly murdering him after his Fake Confession.
• Living a Double Life: As the film unfolds, David does his own investigation alongside the official and finds that he barely knows anything about his daughter, from her friends and activities. Along the way, he found out Margot has been stealing his money under the guise of paying for piano lessons, may have had a secret group of friends he didn't know about, possibly ran away from home with a fake ID to meet up with an online friend. Then it later becomes subverted towards the end of the film as Vick's plan unravels and Margot just turns out to be a good kid, just very lonely and was even stealing the money to help with fish_n_chips's purported financial situation.
• The Lost Lenore: Pamela Kim, whose death devastated David and affected his entire relationship with his daughter. As part of the hell David goes through, he is constantly running across pictures, videos and other reminders of his beloved wife as he searches through the computer.
• Mama Bear: A dark example: Detective Vick becomes a Detective Mole and tries to lead the investigation away from her son, the culprit.
• Meaningful Background Event: A lot on every single account on the computer.
• Meaningful Name: The YouCast user fish_n_chips, revealed to actually be Margot's stalker, Robert, uses a stock photograph and anonymity to pretend to be another girl who can relate to Margot's loss by claiming to have a parent suffering from cancer. The "fish" part of the username is a reference to Catfishing, the act of presenting a false identity to another in order to encourage their engagement.
• Mental Handicap, Moral Deficiency: Implied to be the case, possibly, for Vick's son, Robert. She constantly refers to him as being "different", which has led to a lifetime of rejection and isolation, says that he struggles to fit in with others, and is prone to outbursts. However, it's left ambiguous ultimately whether this is true or just another way for Vick to justify her son's behavior.
• Missing Child: Margot is sixteen when she goes missing.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: David suspects that his brother Peter might have had something to do with Margot's disappearance after reading suggestive messages between them that imply they are hiding something from David, but it turns out that they were talking about Peter giving Margot weed.
• Mons as Characterization: In Margot's video chat with fish_n_chips, she says that her favorite Pokémon is Uxie, while fish_n_chips says her favorite is Kecleon. Margot says she likes Uxie because it has the power to erase memories, alluding to her own struggles with dealing with the grief of losing her mother. As for Kecleon, it's a Pokémon that can change its own type, alluding to how fish_n_chips is really Margot's stalker Robert hiding his identity.
• My Greatest Failure: Even though he has no direct involvement in the matter (and it's eventually revealed to be a lie from Vick), David sees Margot's "murder" as this, thinking that it could have been prevented if he had been more attentive and caring toward her in her time of need. As such, when she is found alive, David finally decides to be more open toward her in order to mend their relationship.
• Never Found the Body: One major clue to the audience that Margot may still be alive is that her body was never found.
• Never Found the Body: Only Margot's car and money were found in the lake, giving hope that she may still be alive.
• Never Suicide: It's hinted that Randy Cartoff, the convict who made the "confession," may not have killed himself. When asked whether Cartoff really committed suicide, Vick doesn't answer.
• No Communities Were Harmed: Many Real Life locations of San Jose, California had their names changed or mixed together for fictional stand-ins in the movie.
  • The name of Margot's high school, Evercreek High, combines the names of two local high schools, Evergreen Valley and Sliver Creek.
  • The "Oakfair Mall" where David confronts Derek uses the names from Westfield Oakridge and Westfield Valley Fair, the latter located in the neighboring town of Santa Clara.
  • Peter's favorite hockey team, the San Jose Fins, is a stand-in for the real-life San Jose Sharks NHL team.
  • The Silicon Valley Police Department is an obvious analogue for San Jose's own police department (and possibly for the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office as well since the majority of Silicon Valley is rooted in most of the county).
• No Sympathy: Derek, on the other hand, cyberbullies Margot and leaves hateful comments about her while she's missing.
• Once More, with Clarity: Vick's explanation that her son Robert was the "fish_n_chips" that Margot was talking to, and not another girl as David has suspected, gives the YouCast videos he saw earlier a different view.
• Papa Wolf: David refuses to stop looking for his daughter come hell or high water, confronts his brother after mistakenly assuming he is a suspect, and beats the everliving crap out of a cyber bully who insults Margot when she is believed dead in front of a lot of people, which leads to said beating being posted in social media.
• Parents as People: A big part of the movie. David is a loving father, but when his wife Pamela dies, he's so consumed with his own grief, he is unable to help Margot deal with her own grief, and they become distant. All of this hinders the search for Margot throughout the movie because David knows so little about her and has to get information about her from second-hand sources, a couple of whom turn out to be unreliable.
• Police Are Useless: Zigzagged. When David reports Margot's disappearance to the authority, he finds that the state he's in, California, has a statistic of resolved missing person cases below 50%, implying that the police forces there are ineffective in finding missing people. When Vick, a seemingly very dedicated detective is assigned to the case, David is a bit more reassured. As the case goes on, however, only David's personal investigation manages to make any progress on finding Margot and what happened to her, while Vick just gives him some clues here and there. There is a reason for the uselessness: Vick was behind the whole thing. She had been leaving fake trails for David to chase and orchestrated the entire case in such a way that no one will know what actually happened to Margot. When David finds out, he calls a squad of police to arrest her then later assists him in rescuing Margot once her location is found.
• Precision F-Strike: Peter drops one after David accuses him of preying on Margot.
  Peter: You come in here and accuse me of something UN-FUCKING-SPEAKABLE and you're wondering what kind of family I AM?!
• Progressive Era Montage: The opening scene shows the evolution of the internet and social media in the 2000s and '10s against the backdrop of Margot growing up with it.
• Really Dead Montage: When the mother dies, we are treated to a Photo Montage of happy moments in her life underscored by sappy music.
• Red Herring: Several of them.
  • Early on in the investigation, David discovers that Margot has been converting cash to online money and sent it all to some sort of shell account. Detective Vick says this is a way to launder money, suggesting that Margot has some sort of criminal enterprise going on. It later turns out that Margot just donated it to her online friend fish_n_chips, and the account has been deleted by Detective Vick to erase the evidence.
  • Derek Ellis is a Hate Sink who plays Teens Are Monsters pretty straight, and David has every reason in the world to suspect that he may have something to do with Margot's disappearance. Turns out he has nothing to do with it — he's just being an asshole about the whole situation.
  • David's brother Peter, whom David finds his disturbing messages with Margot and mistakes him for being a pedophile preying on her. He had nothing to do with her disappearance, he's just sharing weed with her to offer her a way to ease her mind off her own personal issues.
  • The user "fish_n_chips" on YouCast, a young girl who apparently makes several fake aliases and sites to take advantage of people in distress. Turns out the girl shown in those accounts and sites is actually a photoshopped stock photo model used as a roleplay gone horribly wrong. The girl herself has nothing to do with anything.
  • The criminal who confessed to raping and killing Margot before "killing" himself. Turns out Detective Vick, in her desperation to protect her son, framed him for the crime in order to throw the investigation off the tracks and end the case prematurely.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Margot is assumed dead by the police after the False Confession and we see dozens of condolence emails in David's inbox.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • If you watch carefully, something from Pamela's account actually spoils exactly what happened to Margot. When David is looking through the notes of her friends from middle school, he finds a note from Pam that explains that "Robbie Abolt" has a mom in SVPD (Vick), has a crush on Margot (his whole reason for catfishing and attacking her), and is from a divorced family (which explains why he and Vick don't share the same surname).
  • In the second watching, a lot of things Vick does actually foreshadows her actual role as the mastermind behind the plot. She seems very eager, almost too eager even, in trying to solve Margot's case, in California where the rate of resolved missing people cases is below 50%. When David calls her in the middle of the night to inform her that he follows Margot's trail to the lake, Vick immediately goes to the location not even changing her clothes and telling her son Robert that she'll take care of everything. Also, after David assaults Derek at the theater, she orders David to stay put and not participate in the investigation further. In the first case, she immediately goes to the lake because she's afraid that David will find out what her son did to Margot, and in the second case, she cuts David loose after realizing that David will stop at nothing to find out what happened to his daughter and he could find out the truth.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: David finds some suspicious messages between Margot and Peter and assumes that they did something terrible behind his back. He was correct but for the wrong reason. David initially assumes that Peter was grooming Margot into an incestuous relationship, but in reality, Peter was just sharing his weed with her and was not responsible for her disappearance.
• Screamer Prank: In-Universe; one of the videos during the opening montage of the Kims is David being tricked into playing the Maze Game (albeit a copyright-friendly, Exorcist-free version).
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: David's brother Peter. He seems like a harmless stoner...and, despite David's brief concern that he was grooming Margot and therefore had something to do with her disappearance, he is. He only helped Margot and he is genuinely horrified by the accusation.
• Shout-Out:
  • The web address "tvtropes.org/pmwiki.php/Main/Searching" (you know, this very wiki's page for the film, or at least the main page) pops up when David is typing "tumblr" in his URL address bar for a brief moment.
  • Laura Barnes is one of the trending topics for Facebook, seen earlier on in the movie. This is not surprising considering how its producer Timur Bekmambetov is also the producer of that film.
  • One of the trending topics for Reddit reads "Is Margot Kim Gone Girl Crazy?"
  • Margot's high school mascot is the Catfish.
  • M. Night Shyamalan's name is featured in the Facebook trending bar. Chaganty stated that Shyamalan inspired him to get into filmmaking.
  • During David's Google search of Vick, you can see results come up for Detective Rosa Diaz in the search bar.
  • Vick's first name is Rosemary, and her only son attacked and nearly killed Margot.
  • Of course, there are a few to Pokémon, which Margot is a fan of. Her Poké Ball keychain is a plot point.
• Social Media Is Bad: Played with. The bad side of social media is shown — Margot's schoolmates post about her disappearance for sympathy points although none of them were close to her, and a video of David attacking one of her schoolmates goes viral to his detriment. However, it's only through social media that David is able to make any headway in his search at all.
• Stalker with a Crush: Vick's son Robert is this toward Margot, having catfished her for months just to talk to her.
• Stealth Pun: The username of the account catfishing Margot is fish_n_chips.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: The film looks like it's going to have a Downer Ending with David's efforts to find his missing daughter being All for Nothing with an ex-con confessing to murdering her, until a stock photo causes David to realize that the murder confession was actually a frame-up by the detective in charge of the case and his daughter turns out to be alive after all.
• Taking the Heat: Done twice. First Vick forces a suspect to falsely confess to Margot's killing in order to end the search before she can be found and again when Vick goes out of her way to take all the blame for her son's crimes. While she obviously does bear the guilt for covering for Robert and possibly killing the man she originally forced to confess, her attempts to make Robert's intentions in meeting Margot come off as squeaky clean, and her disappearance merely being a victim of happenstance does come off as her trying too hard to protect him.
• Technologically Blind Elders: David doesn't know what tumblr is when a friend of Margot brings up the fact that she was using it a lot.
• Vigilante Man: David confronts Derek and gets into a fight with him. Vick reminds him later that he is allowed to have his suspicions but he cannot act on them which is the police's job.
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: MemorialOne's live feed of the vigil at the church goes offline as soon as the police show up to arrest Vick.
• Weather Saves the Day: When Vick tries to assert that Margot would have inevitably died from dehydration at the bottom of the ravine without water for five days, David recalls that three days ago the area suffered a severe rainstorm. The storm ends up having provided Margot with enough drinking water to survive by the time she's found.
• Wham Line:
  • David calls up the model used as the profile pic of the "fish_n_chips" account on YouCast and asks her questions about knowing Margot, only for the girl to tell him she doesn't know any Margot. When David tells her what's basically happened with Margot on YouCast, the model (whose name is Hannah) replies with:
    Hannah: ...What's YouCast?
  • The operator at the police station telling David that Vick volunteered to get on the case to find Margot, as opposed to him being told earlier that Vick was assigned to it.
• Wham Shot: To the public, the case is resolved, if tragically... and then David notices that Margot's friend on YouCast, whom Vick had told him was legit and had an alibi, has the same face as a stock photo model, meaning Vick had been lying about that...and possibly everything else.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Although she does successfully negotiate for her son's felony charges to be dropped, meaning Robert will end up serving little if any prison time, the audience does not get to see the outcome of Vick's own trial, though presumably she is found guilty.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Detective Vick chews out David after his own personal investigation has gone too aggressive which results in a brawl between him and Derek Ellis that lands the latter in a hospital before deciding to cut David loose from the case entirely. It's later revealed to be a ploy. Vick was behind the whole case, so the reason she cut David loose is that she realizes David will stop at nothing to find his daughter and the truth will be out.
  • Peter calls out David for neglecting Margot's well-being after her mother's death, which ends up with David barely knowing anything about Margot and causes her to confide with Peter instead and starts to smoke weed to ease the pain.

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"I didn't know her. I didn't know my daughter."