Making Friends is Hard to Do: The You’ll Never Find Me Review

Another day of Fantastic Fest means another 8:00 a.m. screening to start off the whole day. This time, my body was in a fight for its life to stay awake after only getting about three hours of sleep the night before. No big deal, short nights come for us all—and if anything, seeing a movie about isolated Australian people while battling minor sleep deprivation seems in step with the vibes of Fantastic Fest. Nevertheless, it was once again me and about five people in the theater as we sat down to experience the 2023 Australian thriller You’ll Never Find Me.

Directed by Josiah Allen and Indianna Bell working with a script crafted by Bell, the film takes no time in creating a world of dread. Set in a secluded trailer park somewhere in Australia, we find a lonesome man named Patrick (Brendan Rock, whose voice hews very close to Guy Pearce’s in The Rover) sitting in silence in his home. Outside, rain pummels the roof and the sounds of something else creep in and out of Patrick and the audience’s ears. The film maximizes the tension of every sound in Patrick’s creaking home. In these beginning moments, Bell and Allen create an unsettling environment, one where all the mysteries tease at your brain.

Things begin to shift, for Patrick and the audience, when a frantic knock comes at his door in the middle of the storm. Finding a woman (Jordan Cowan) drenched in the rain and looking for shelter, Patrick uneasily lets her into his home. From there, You’ll Never Find Me morphs into a cat-and-mouse game that goes on a bit longer than it should.

Much of the film revolves around the Rock and Cowan’s ability to communicate as much as possible in dialogue and body language, as they’re portraying essentially the only characters in the story. Rock is impressive as the unreadable Patrick, a man who looks like even his secrets have secrets. However, he still manages to instill sympathy into his emotionally locked down character. Although some of the “life is meaningless” monologues he gives get tiresome, Rock is such a compelling actor to watch that, at least in the moment, you give him and his lines full attention.

As his opposite, Cowan is set up to play a sort of damsel in distress—but Bell and Allen throw in a few twists to push her character away from that initial assumption. In the later half of the film, as audience loyalties shift from one character to another, both actors do their part in making the character turns work.

But the film’s final act falters when it fully settles on what the story is all about. While not a completely obvious twist, it feels like one of the safer places to take the story. Although the narrative stumbles in this final act, the visuals take a step up, moving from moody shadows to phantasmagoric lighting. In these moments, it feels like Bell and Allen are throwing out all the scary imagery and sounds they can think of to make up for the film’s initial slow-burn dread. Some scenes in this last act work, and some don’t, but I can’t deny that it doesn’t feel like leaving a chaotic whirlwind by the time the credits roll.

There’s a lot of talent behind and in front of the camera for You’ll Never Find Me. At the same time, the talent seems to be doing too much to prop up a story that would work best in a short film format. Still, it’s a credit to the film that every aspect involved feels too good to be bolstering a barebones story.