The film was inspired by the Oscar-winning post-Holocaust drama also called The Search,[4] directed by Fred Zinnemann, in which a compassionate westerner helps a lost child find what is left of his family amidst the chaotic flood of post-war civilian refugees.

In the 1948 film, the backdrop is post-war Berlin; The Search (2014) takes place in the "front lines of the Russian invasion of Chechnya"[5] during the first year of the Second Chechen War (1999–2009).

[5] McCarthy also cited Ghigo's contribution with his "well-chosen locations, the crowded city scenes, detention centers and army barracks reek with the feel, sounds and discomfort of humanity pressed into unnaturally tight quarters.

[23] The Guardian journalist Peter Bradshaw argued that Hazanavicius' attempt at "Old Hollywood big-hearted sincerity" devolved from an earnest rejection of violence against all actors in a war, into naive sentimentality.

However, he called the film a "grueling, lumbering, two-and-a-half-hour humanitarian tract that all but collapses under the weight of its own moral indignation" with an approach that was "ultimately hectoring" and "didactic.

"[5] The Globe and Mail critic Liam Lacey described the film as "long, unoriginal and heavy-handed", a direct opposite of Hazanavicius' Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, The Artist.

[24] Critic Todd McCarthy observed that the Chechen faction to which the Russians were responding — referred to as rebels, terrorists or invaders elsewhere — are conspicuously absent from the film's mosaic.