A dark and stormy night, two apparent strangers, one room, and a bizarre mystery tying them together – You’ll Never Find Me, on paper, sounds like a cliché. But this ambitious horror-thriller is anything but predictable.
You’ll Never Find Me, out earlier this year, follows Patrick (Brendan Rock), an older man living alone in a trailer in an isolated part of Australia, when a night of drinking is interrupted by an unexpected guest (played by Jordan Cowan) – a young woman, seemingly looking for shelter from a violent storm. However, as suspicions between the pair begin to grow, tension starts to rise, and the truth behind her visit becomes clear. It’s the debut feature from directors Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen, with Bell also penning the screenplay.
For a closed-room horror like this, your character work has to be truly and totally immaculate – from the writing to the direction to the performance – and Bell and Allan use every piece of cinematic language at their disposal to bring it together. The memorably grotesque audio serves as a fascinating contrast to what, at a glance, looks like a pretty straightforward visual style – but even that is laced with more meaning than it might seem at first glance. From the knickknacks scattered around his caravan to the way a shot is framed to just deny you an answer as to what’s out of frame, there’s not a single opportunity missed here to advance the story and inform these characters.
Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan lead the tense two-hander, both relative unknowns, though I think that status really benefits the movie as a whole. As we saw with Longlegs earlier this year, a big-name actor of any distinction can be harder to lose in a character piece, because you, as a viewer, find yourself seeing The Name and not the character; You’ll Never Find Me banks on these two being able to completely vanish into their roles, and my God, they do exactly that. These performances are both pretty damn extraordinary, and, in a just movie world, they’ll serve as a jumping-off point for both actors to move on to similarly challenging, dense characters.
And it’s this precision, this control, in the direction and the writing and the performances, that makes the final act of the film hit all the harder. The last act is a psychedelic, abstract, and genuinely nightmarish sequence that doesn’t feel, as these things often do, like a slapdash attempt to throw some weird shit at the wall in place of an ending. But rather bring together all the story threads into a really satisfying whole – I don’t want to ruin the twist here, because it’s so worth seeing with fresh eyes, but suffice to say that it’s fair without being totally predictable.
You’ll Never Find Me is one of those brilliantly tight movies that dips into various genres – horror, drama, thriller – with ease, under the guidance of directors more confident than their debut status might suggest. It’s a promising start for Allen and Bell, but, more than that, it’s just a bloody great film in its own right. My suggestion: watch it now, before it starts doing the rounds and you get spoiled, and enjoy this unique indie treat as fresh as you can.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Guardian)
No But Listen 