You'll Never Find Me

What are the chances that a lost young woman would find her way to particular trailer on a particular night, seeking to escape a storm? It’s a tricky question – trickier than it might seem – and it lies at the heart of Josiah Allen and Indianna Bell’s twisty little horror tale. Quick to travel from a Glasgow Frightfest screening to Shudder, this economically constructed thriller has been winning fans on the festival circuit for months, and you’ll soon see why.

It’s built around powerful but very different performances from Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan as the trailer resident and the visitor respectively. Middle-aged and a little on the plump side, with a fuzzy jumper and unkempt hair, he seems harmless despite his initially brusque manner – he’s hesitant to answer the door at night, he says, because local kids keep banging on it and then running away. Still, he’s probably twice her weight, and this is his space, and she’s cautious as most women would be. She’s thin and a little awkward, curiously barefoot, and little details of her story don’t seem to add up. Should he be wary too?

The film keeps us guessing for quite some time, despite delivering a number of unsettling hints. It also creates uncertainty as to what the characters understand about themselves, with the woman experiencing strange hallucinations and the man also distracted in little ways, perhaps – it is suggested – by grief which he does not wish to discuss. Both of them show vulnerabilities so you might find yourself rooting for them to become friends and support one another, even though you will know full well that films like this never end that way.

Like many films with this sort of structure, You’ll Never Find Me loses its balance a little after it does have to make a decision, and the latter part takes longer than is needed to make its point. Nevertheless, it’s competently handled throughout and generates an impressive amount of tension from its spare premise. This is thanks in part to the beautifully balanced script, and in part to those performances, but the location is also very nicely used – a space in which one character’s physical position can easily limit another character’s options or hide something from view. The simple decoration contributes to telling us who the man is whilst alerting the viewer to the various small objects whose use might advantage one or the other of the two.

Exploring themes around morality and adjacent issues in psychology, the film shuns gore but still manages to be viscerally unpleasant when it needs to be, with a suitably chilling underlying fixation. It balances its cleverness well with moments of distracting tenderness, and in so doing manages a trick too often overlooked: it makes its story matter.