Written and directed by Indianna Bell, co-directed by Josiah Allen, Patrick, a strange and lonely resident, lives in a mobile home at the back of an isolated trailer park. After a violent storm, a mysterious young woman appears at his door seeking shelter from the elements. Starring: Brendan Rock, Jordan Cowan, Elena Carapetis and Angela Korng.
Intimate, understated, tension-filled, claustrophobic stories are the unsung heroes of the horror genre. The knowledge that less is more, that your audience’s imagination and assumptions are powerful tools, and letting them expand and intensify your creation, is a wonderful thing to find in a filmmaker. For the most part, that’s exactly what you get from Josiah Allen and Indianna Bell with You’ll Never Find Me.
First and foremost, there’s the issue of trust, it’s the bedrock of so many beloved horror and thriller films and it comes in full force here. It’s the classic argument of whether you should trust yourself or be trusting of others, the fight to find the balance of survival, logic, politeness and believing in the kindness of strangers, with a decent dose of cynicism thrown in for good measure. Then in that same sense follows whether or not the viewer believes everything in front of them is real.
There’s a quality to You’ll Never Find Me that’s like a fever dream, it’s so wonderfully ominous that anything is possible, while not much even needs to happen at all. Especially when you add in the fantastic score work (by Darren Lim), which is heavily Hitchcockian and only improves every scene it sits atop. The direction is so excellently focused, building on the overwhelming isolation, and growing the fear and suspicion as they go along.
There’s also a lot of relevant nods throughout the film, particularly what it means to be a woman in today’s world. Exploring the typical male perspective of ‘all I’ve done is be nice’ and that it should lead to reciprocation, when survival and history dictates no woman can or should let her guard down that easily in such a vulnerable position. Jordan Cowan does a wonderful job of capturing that struggle of self-protection while wanting to believe others can be good, and also giving the character a great amount of mystery. Something both Cowan and Brendan Rock excel at.
Rock plays with perception and judgement, giving you simultaneous reasons to trust and not trust him which makes for a great tennis match for the audience to decide if he’s predator or prey. The two of them hold your attention effortlessly, never giving too much away and the way that they play off of each other is gripping. Perhaps the only thing that lets it down is the ending, changing up the style completely in favour of something loud, brash and bloody. You can see the logic behind it but it’s such an overt change in style that it undercuts what has come before it.
You’ll Never Find Me finds success in its subtlety, going old school and close quarters for an enthralling ninety-six minutes. Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen fill the atmosphere with a rich tension and an isolation that’s like having walls slowly closing in as time passes by. Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan give the film everything you could possibly need, their terrific performances are more than enough to lead the film down its path of darkness in a quietly thrilling manner.
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