The Search
2021 · 17m · Francia
Directed by David Vergne
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In 1978, Italy's Law 180 restructured its psychiatric system, and the psychiatric hospitals that experimented on patients closed one by one. Forty years after his father's disappearance, Ben Wagner found clues in an abandoned hospital in the Turin region; helped by his two best friends, Franz and Bill, he sets out to explore the building searching the archives — soon realising they are not the only ones seeking this information, and that a corporation will do everything possible to keep the truth hidden.
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The scouts
The corporate conspiracy angle feels like a concession to thriller convention—what's genuinely unsettling here is the formal interrogation of institutional memory itself, the way an abandoned archive becomes a text that won't stay dead. It's smarter than its own plot wants to admit.
Vergne positions this within a rigorous archival cinema tradition, where the search through physical space becomes an act of historical reckoning; the restraint in not sensationalizing Law 180's horrors, instead letting the building's silence speak, marks this as formally literate work aware of its ethical weight.
The decision to filter the thriller mechanics through Ben's personal genealogy—making the investigation *about* a father's absence rather than just a mystery to solve—is what transforms this from procedural into something that breathes; that choice alone reframes every frame.