Searchers
3/5
Searchers (2016) gets its name from the 1956 John Ford picture The Searchers, one of the most influential films of all time. Attempting a semi-remake of a film with such status is as ambitious as it is intriguing, but Searchers finds itself locked into a plot structure that isn’t necessarily conducive to how the majority of the film plays out; by the end it struggles to do its job in the allotted time frame.
In the Ford film, the quasi-hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) finds that his family has been slaughtered and his nieces abducted by Comanche, and spends some 20-odd years doggedly tracking them down. In Searchers (directed by Zacharias Kunuk) the whole murder/abduction/search/find process takes around three days, which inevitably lessens the emotional impact of the search/find portion (in actuality, the word “search” isn’t correct, as the hero merely tracks the killers over the course of a day and a half).
The trials of Searchers’ characters are real and arduous and just as dire as those of Edwards, it’s just that for the audience, the shock of the murder/abduction scene is still fresh in our minds by the time the film concludes 40 minutes later, with the effect being that we are not completely convinced that the kidnapped women are lost forever, the place of insurmountable uncertainty where The Searchers draws most of its emotional impact from.
Searchers is not a sub-standard film; in fact, it’s full of fascinating details—specifically the cultural ones associated with the Inuit families the film centres on. For someone who grew up with a thermostat on the wall, Kunuk presents an unbelievably hostile world—one devoid of trees and seemingly without any life besides those humans that inhabit it—and it’s strangely enthralling to watch the families live their lives. Kunuk uses extremely long shots to put the audience inside the igloos or along with the sleds, and often after the strenuousness of a sled chase, I felt as exhausted as the chasers looked.
Searchers is an interesting project (without even talking about the subverting of the Western genre) made with a keen eye, but struggles to tell its own story at times. It’s commendable to take on such a classic film so overtly, but it was perhaps not what Searchers needed in the end, and a little deviation from Ford’s film might have made all the difference.