While I don't mean this as a major criticism, You'll Never Find Me is a feature debut that feels like a feature debut. Smart decisions have been made, such as keeping the action based in one location, and the emphasis is always kept on the actors and the screenplay, but most people will watch it and know, almost immediately, that they're being shown the debut film from someone.
Brendan Rock plays Patrick, a man who stays on his own in a trailer park home. We see him sitting up late at night, clearly troubled, when he receives a mysterious visitor (Jordan Cowan, credited simply as The Visitor). As the weather worsens and the two are forced to spend some more time together, things soon start to become mysterious and dark. What was Patrick really doing up at such a late hour, and why did this woman find her way to his door? Do both of these people have secrets they are hiding from one another?
Written by Indianna Bell, who also co-directed with Josiah Allen, this is a tricky film to rate and review. Everything onscreen is done well. The performances from the two main leads (and there are only one or two other people appearing very briefly) are excellent, the setting is deliberately turned into something claustrophobic and stifling, and the dialogue is very carefully chosen and delivered, especially for a film that has so many quiet moments.
There's one big problem though, the fact that it is leading you to a destination you can see from the very earliest scenes. While not the worst cinematic crime that can be committed, You'll Never Find Me doesn't have any big surprises, although the pacing and construction of the film seem to be building up to something revelatory and impactful. Because there are no real surprises, that impact is greatly reduced. There may even be many people, like myself, who came up with a number of potentially better ways in which the story could have gone. That's a shame, but I am not sure how it could have been avoided, although I think shaving 10 minutes or so off the runtime might have helped. But maybe that is why I haven’t made a movie and these people have, because everything here has been carefully considered and tweaked accordingly, including the slow pacing for the slow burn towards the pay off.
Perhaps it just didn’t find me in the right mood, or perhaps it was never going to be able to push too far beyond the obvious limitations imposed upon it. Rock and Cowan are both excellent, and attack their roles with the required subtlety or heightened emotions, depending on the scene, and it is hard to really think of other ways I would have wanted this put together. It just falters enough to stop it from being a great little horror movie though, but it stands up as a great calling card for everyone involved.
6/10
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