Australia has long been one of my go-to areas for horror that holds no punches. It’s one of my most obvious touchpoints for notable differences in permissibility and tolerance between American filmmaking and that from other countries. As it stands, Australia and Korea are my two most commonly referenced countries for horror that is far more visceral in one way or another than anything we in the States could come up with, almost without even trying.
Releasing on Shudder this week, YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME is an interesting little addition to the pantheon of internationally made tension. Written by Indianna Bell and directed by Bell and Josiah Allen, the collective directorial debut YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME feels and plays a lot like a tense stageplay. Confined to a single setting and only three characters ever mentioned, it’s a harrowing slow burn that does an exceptional job of making the viewer feel just a little bit like we’re looking in on something we shouldn’t be.
Patrick (Brendan Rock) is a lonely, haunted man with a secret who lives alone in a mobile home at the back of a trailer park. As he settles in for the night amid a raging storm, a young woman (Jordan Cowan) bangs on his door begging refuge from the rain and a lift back to her car. It’s when she enters the scene that things really get interesting—and way more tense. Immediately we are thrust into what feels like a continuously shifting cat and mouse game between the nameless young woman and Patrick. She is palpably in fear for her life at multiple points the more she assesses the situation, and yet every once in a while, something shifts, and she begins to feel like the bigger threat. It’s a fascinating play between the two of them and does a masterful job of keeping the tension high for the duration this slow burner.
It’s not a perfect film, of course—very few ever are—and yet one of the things that weakens it is impressive in its own right. On the one hand you have the constantly shifting idea of feeling like you, as a viewer, know exactly where this film is going, and then you find out you’re wrong, and then you find out that, actually, you might have been right all along and have to decide if the payoff was really worth the bait and switch. I’m still not certain where I sit with how I feel about how this one played out, ultimately, but if YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME has set out to do anything, it has set out to be a bleak and uncomfortable journey into a very simple trap. On the other hand, you have the double-edged sword of excellent sound design (led by Duncan Campbell but made possible through an extensive sound department).
The storm outside Patrick’s mobile home is unrelentingly heavy which, while it enforces the idea of this location as basically a trap—it’s too heavy even to see very far in front of you, and an immediate soaking—it is also very effective, and likely unintentional, ASMR that might find some viewers nodding off despite the film’s best efforts. Cowan gives a magnetic performance as the woman (credited as “The Visitor”), though, and Rock is deeply unsettling as Patrick, and there is always the possibility that the sound of the rain was highlighted with such intensity as a way to make us lower our own defenses against the forces at work in this home.
There’s something at the center of YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME’s plot that doesn’t quite sit right with me, and may not sit well with others, but that is perhaps less a negative statement against the film than a testament to its effectiveness. It is, above nearly all else, unrelentingly uncomfortable to watch, but I find myself leaning more toward its message being intentionally bleak than anything else. It’s been a minute since I have encountered something so unsettling to sit with crafted in such a confined space and cast. YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME is a dark, disturbing, wriggling, and impressive debut from Bell and Allen that stands on the strengths of its lead performances and the claustrophobic nature of its single setting. You might want to shower and close the blinds when it’s over, but you won’t forget Cowan or Rock any time soon.
YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME releases on Shudder March 22, 2024.
Tags: Brendan Rock, Duncan Campbell, Indianna Bell, Jordan Cowan, Josiah Allen, Shudder, You'll Never Find Me
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