The debut feature from Adelaide film-makers Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen is thrillingly bold and inventive despite being steeped in familiar horror tropes: a darkened hallway, flashes of lightning, creaking walls and floorboards, the howling of wind. In this way, You’ll Never Find Me – which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca film festival and is released nationally on Thursday – reminded me of the pleasures of reading Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft, whose narratives are filled with foundational horror elements but unfold with a kind of unselfconscious purity (or perhaps “sickliness” is a better word), coming alive in the magical ebb and flow of the prose.
There’s a feverishly wet and moody ambience to this film; it feels like it’s dripping all over you.
The story begins when a young unnamed woman credited only as “The Visitor” knocks on a caravan door, seeking shelter from a dark and stormy night. “I’m just trying to work out what is actually happening here,” says the woman, played by Jordan Cowan, and she might as well be speaking for the audience. We’ll too spend thrilling moments of this morbidly great chamber piece trying to get our heads around what’s going on.
Inside the caravan is Patrick (Brendan Rock), a weary and worried-looking man with soft features, whose hobbies include staring glumly ahead and philosophising about the nature of human behaviour. The woman says the weather has “gone fucking crazy out there”, not that we need her to draw attention to it – the storm is a huge part of the film, seeming to shake its very foundations. She asks for a lift into town but Patrick is more interested in sharing weighty, melancholic reflections, discussing how he tries to “avoid sleep altogether” even though things become “more confused, more entwined”. An intensely heightened mood helps the cast get away with lines that might’ve felt awfully heavy-handed elsewhere, such as “it doesn’t matter where you hide” and “I’m afraid you’ve knocked on the wrong door.”
Allen and Bell, who also wrote the screenplay, reveal mysteries both small and large; by the end, they prompt a reassessment of the entire experience to fully appreciate certain aspects of it. Early on, for instance, we see Patrick clutching a small vial of clear liquid … what is it? Much later, in the final act, the frame is bathed in overripe, giallo-esque blues and reds; these colours are moody as all get-out, but are deployed for other, very clever reasons – not to be spoiled here.
Both leading performances are excellent. Brendan Rock brings rueful, enigmatically deep and dark qualities: the deflated look of a man lost inside himself. He’s courteous and polite, offering his “Visitor” a shower and food, but speaks too slowly, as if he’s burdened by a thousand sins pushing his feet through the ground. And Jordan Cowan holds herself so well, juggling steeliness and nervousness, confidence and vulnerability, her big probing eyes evoking various metaphors: eyes as the doors of perception, the windows to the soul, the mirrors of the mind.
We’re aware that she’s knocked on his door, making the first move, dramatically speaking. One can sense a peculiar cat and mouse game going on, though we’re not sure who is who, obscured as everything is by layers of deception. The characters don’t seem to trust each other, and we don’t trust them, or the directors for that matter. There’s a niggling sense that something is terribly wrong, but for a long time we can’t be sure what.
In one scene Patrick discusses the past in his typically morose style, but doesn’t turn to face his companion: a simple but effective way of making the encounter weird and unsettling – though perhaps we’re jumping at shadows, reading too much into it. The directors give this scene, and indeed the film more generally, lots of oxygen and room to get the viewer psychologically lost; they fill the picture with long, suspenseful dramatic passages that creep and swell its joints, bringing a feeling of heaviness, of heaving, of compounding pressure.
Bell and Allen have created something very difficult: an environment that feels like it’s situated at the edge of consciousness, a kind of waking nightmare. The caravan seems to float around the outskirts of the universe, or perhaps the dark recesses of the psyche.
You’ll Never Find Me builds a profoundly creepy and spiralling momentum before everything comes together in a shockingly brilliant final act with twists that nobody will see coming – or be able to forget.
You’ll Never Find Me is in Australian cinemas now and on Shudder from 22 March.
