Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Josiah Allen, Indianna Bell
Starring: Brendan Rock, Jordan Cowan
Recently the bladder-busting 3.5 hour run time of Martin Scorsese's
Killers of the Flower Moon sparked a debate around just how long a movie needs to be. The
question is akin to asking how long is a piece of string. There's no
ideal universal run time; a movie simply needs to be as long as it needs
to be. Some movies feel rushed and in need of another half hour or so to
flesh out their stories, but in the horror genre in recent years I've
come across too many feature films that would have been far more
impactful as shorts or episodes of anthology shows. Such movies are
usually of the type that are centred on delivering an EC comics-esque
twist in the tale, with much of what leads up to that climactic twist
coming off as unnecessary filler.
That's the case with the Aussie chiller
You'll Never Find Me from directors
Josiah Allen and Indianna Bell (the latter wrote the
script). There's a potentially nail-biting 45 minute thriller here, but
the movie fails to sustain its tension for its 96 minutes.
It opens with a middle-aged man, Patrick (Brendan Rock), alone
in a caravan in the middle of a violent storm. Nursing a vial of liquid
in his hands, it seems he's about to take his own life when he's
interrupted by a loud knock on his door. Outside is a soaking wet young
woman (Jordan Cowan, whose character is credited solely as "The
Visitor") who claims she needs a ride home. Patrick claims his car has
been acting up, plus the trailer park locks its gates at midnight and
it's now 2am. When The Visitor asks if she can make a call, Patrick
tells her he doesn't own a phone but he'll take her to the park's phone
when the storm dies down.
The nature of both participants is initially thrillingly ambiguous,
with the film dangling clues as to their motives only to pull them away
just when we've think we've got it all figured out. Simply by way of
being a man, Brendan is immediately sinister and we're primed to feel
worried for The Visitor. It doesn't help that he makes creepy gestures
like insisting the young woman remove her wet shirt so he can dry it on
a heater, or that she take a shower. The tomato soup he boils for The
Visitor is a worryingly ocre shade. Are we simply victims of a
misandrist prejudice in viewing Brendan's offers with suspicion or is he
genuinely a threat?
Things are muddied by the suspicious behaviour of The Visitor. Her
story seems to change every time Brendan quizzes her, and she can't
explain how she got into the trailer park despite it being locked up.
And after all, she was the one who turned up on Brendan's doorstep. It's
not as though she was lured there.
The trouble with this setup is that no matter how many times the film
tries to play with our expectations, if you put a big burly middle-aged
man in a room with a waifish young woman our fears are always going to
lie with the latter. As such, any attempts to make it seem as though
Brendan is the one in danger never quite work. That's why the movie is
far more effective when it explicitly puts us on the side of The
Visitor. There are unnerving sequences as we share the young woman's POV
in trying to figure out if her shower is set to be interrupted, if her
drink is poisoned, or if the caravan's door is locked.
If the dynamic between the two characters never quite works as
effectively as the film would like, the blame can't be levelled at Rock
or Cowan. Both are excellent in their roles. Rock's quiet manner comes
off as either malevolent or sympathetic depending on the strings being
pulled by the filmmakers, and while mostly effective as a potential
victim, Cowan's performance is subtly offbeat enough to suggest she
might not be the innocent party we might assume.
You'll Never Find Me can't quite maintain its tension for
its feature length however, and the final twist is both somewhat
predictable and logic defying, reliant on one character not being able
to put two and two together. It climaxes with a riff on the ending of a
certain grindhouse thriller from the early '80s that has been rehashed
so often recently that it's become a horror cliché. It's amusing how the
'80s movie in question was criticised for its perceived misogyny yet has
lately been homaged by several genre thrillers that would like to
consider themselves feminist in their leanings.
You'll Never Find Me is on
Shudder from March 22nd.
