Searching for Sonny

I saw this film at the Austin Film Festival, and found it to be much more enjoyable than I'd expected. The preview in some ways doesn't do it justice. Searching for Sonny is a quirky, stylized comedy that delivers everything from amused chuckles to outright guffaws. A large part of that is due to the work of Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney (better known on the web as the comedy team, BriTANicK), who bring an edge of lunacy to the proceedings. The lead, Jason Dohring (beloved by TV fans for his roles in cult classics Veronica Mars and Moonlight), as the depressed and somewhat befuddled Elliott, provides a great foil for the others as they work their way through the mystery surrounding the curious disappearance of their old high school buddy, Sonny (Masi Oka of Heroes and Hawaii Five-O). Alice Wood's lush score, and Clarke Peters' voice-over narration combine, as writer/director Andrew Disney has commented, to give these characters a bigger story than they deserve--and the result is an extremely watchable comedy that should leave viewers smiling.