Searching is a gripping mystery, where almost all of the film take places on the main character–David Kim’s–laptop. It’s very serious and intense, but if you go back an pay close attention to everything in the film, you’ll learn the Earth is about to be invaded by aliens.
A special feature in which writer/director Aneesh Chaganty and writer Sev Ohanian discuss the Easter egg is hidden in the main menu of movie. This completely spoils the end of the movie, but we won’t do that here. To find it, you’ll have to highlight “Languages,” then press up to highlight a folder on the desktop with a question mark on it. That’s where this Easter egg special feature is located.
Towards the end of the feature, it’s explained that throughout the movie, there’s a subplot about an alien invasion on Earth. There is a moment when Kim (John Cho) is on YouTube and there’s a video called “Real Footage of alien sighting at Sequoia 5/14/17,” which at first, doesn’t seem too out of the ordinary because YouTube has plenty of videos like that. However, from there, it gets a bit more weird.
Still early on in the movie, there are news articles from NASA about electromagnetic anomalies, people from NASA are murdered, and the President is going to address it all, including extra-terrestrial life on Earth. So while Kim is trying to find his daughter, the world is on the brink of an alien invasion. However, this secret subplot is never resolved, so it’s up to the viewer to guess where it goes. I’m guessing everyone in the movie has been replaced by aliens.
Chaganty and Ohanian only discussed a few of these alien invasion Easter eggs. However, they said there is a reference to this subplot in the background of almost every scene, which will make you want to go back and hunt for them all. The extensive planning needed to pull this off in an already complicated film is outstanding.
Additionally, this special feature goes over around 10 of the Easter eggs within the film, which completely spoil the movie; however, there are around 500 of them scattered everywhere, in every scene, and we only caught a few when the movie first came out. It greatly enhances the rewatchability of the movie, just to see if you can spot any other insane subplots.
Searching is available now both digitally and on DVD and Blu-ray.



