We spend most of our lives looking at screens — those invaluable portals to our lives. From phones to laptops to theater projections, life has become a series of glowing images. Work, entertainment and social contact have all been grouped into different apps. It wasn’t going to be long before somebody started to think what fiction could do with those same screens: how they might look in our darkest, most desperate moments, what we would use them for and what they would see in turn.

This summer, two dueling thrillers — Unfriended: Dark Web and Searching — will hit cinemas, offering different approaches to this same concept. They share a central gimmick (telling the whole narrative by peering into a main character’s desktop window) and a production company (Bazelevs Company, founded by Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov) — but produce far different effects on the audience.

Back in 2014, Bazelevs and Universal came together to release Unfriended, a teen horror flick that takes place entirely in a Skype chat session. The film became a sleeper hit by mixing supernatural vibes with a contemporary message on cyberbullying. Four years later, Unfriended: Dark Web aims to up the stakes by switching out ghosts for a more impactful boogeyman — a human trafficking ring.

After Matias (Colin Woodell) nabs a laptop from a cafe’s lost and found, he unwittingly joins a mysterious dark web society known as The River where anonymous individuals buy and sell videos of illicit sex crimes. It isn’t long before this society catches onto him and demands silence. His friends wind up becoming a part of this underworld, with life and death hanging in the balance. While the first Unfriended found some humor in its concept, Dark Web digs its feet into an uncomfortable reality. Scenes of horrific torture are breezed through without much of a second thought by either the characters or the filmmakers. It’s an unpleasant movie, made all the worse by a total lack of payoff. Despite a plodding first act that builds up the core characters, none of that feels meaningful by the end. It turns into yet another meat grinder of hapless kids tossed into life-or-death scenarios where all options feel hollow.

Searching stars John Cho as a recently widowed father investigating the disappearance of his teenage daughter after a shocking accident. Assisted by a veteran detective (Debra Messing), Cho digs into his daughter’s life from her laptop. Unlike Dark Web, Searching isn’t devoted to its central gimmick. While the entire film plays out in a series of desktop captures, the viewpoint readily shifts around the screen. Hard cuts to video footage drop the film’s voyeuristic pretense. A pounding score is unapologetically non-diegetic. Director Aneesh Chaganty (previously a commercial director for Google) treats the desktop screen like a full film set, constantly panning and zooming across it to tell a compelling story.

While Searching’s narrative isn’t totally original, Chaganty does an admirable job of using the style to make it feel fresh. Red herrings and misdirections are littered in the background of news sites and social media, teasing eagle-eyed viewers into false conclusions. The plot feels fairly classic, harkening back to countless dramas about missing persons. But through a modern presentation, Searching comes off as fresh and exciting. It over-explains a few of its own twists and won’t blow the mind of anyone with a rudimentary interest in modern digital crime, but it is a tight film that hits the spot.

Click here for more film reviews

It’s always funny when two films with such similar premises hit theaters this close to one another. It even seems likely that casual audiences will readily confuse these two films, and that’s a real shame. Searching isn’t the first movie to tell a whole story through webpages and webcam footage, but it’s easily the first one that can be earnestly recommended to any fan of mystery. While Unfriended may have been the first major first to the gimmick, Dark Web shows that the series has already run dry of original ideas.

Unfriended: Dark Web will be released on July 20; Searching hits theaters Aug. 3

Follow Chris on Twitter
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)