Directors: Indianna Bell, Josiah Allen
Stars: Jordan Cowan, Brendan Rock, Elena Carapetis
It’s been a banner year for Australian horror. From hipster hit Talk to Me through controversy-courting Late Night with the Devil and even conceivably including Kitty Green’s fraught gender standoff The Royal Hotel, Down Under’s been repping well on our screens, large and small. Adding to the roster and new on Shudder, here’s Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen’s contained feature debut You’ll Never Find Me, a smartly scaled pressure cooker of tension set in a humble trailer park trailer during a rainstorm.
On this particular dark and blustery night, middle-aged loner Patrick (Brendan Rock) finds himself party to an unexpected – and unnamed – visitor (Jordan Cowan) who knocks on his door at 2 in the morning seeking shelter.
Bell and Allen make hay out of the spaces between the dialogue, stretching out time but also levelling the playing field between their inscrutable protagonists, asking us to question whom we ought to be placing our sympathies with. The Visitor’s story of fleeing from the beach doesn’t seem to hold water with Patrick, while his gruff demeanor and isolated existence raises all manner of red flags for suspicious audience members predisposed to favouring the unarmed woman. His oblique references to past regrets don’t help any. As the two play a coy game of conversational chess, the trailer creaks and groans around them, manifesting – or heightening – our own unease.
Yet if this makes the dialogue sound incidental, it is anything but. Patrick monologues tremulously over the difference (or lack thereof) between fear and excitement while The Visitor surreptitiously eyes clues among his artefacts, and Rock’s delivery is hypnotic, the timber of his voice gravelly and severe. The Visitor gives as good as she gets, too, seeking common ground between them, calling unemployment “a chronic condition” making the two of them sound like outcasts enfeebled by the state.
Granted, the portentousness of such diatribes does start to grate after a time. The pacing of You’ll Never Find Me can come to feel agonisingly measured, but Bell and Allen counter complete inertia with some well-timed punctuation. Dolled-out revelations and timely shifts in the balance of power. Still, the mood of many of the wordier sequences is significantly enhanced by the sighing score provided by Darren Lim. It wraps the picture up, holding it together like the thin walls of the trailer keeping out the storm… or threatening to bust open and let chaos reign.
There’s a dynamic of sexual threat in Patrick’s innocuous but persistent offers to help his guest dry off. Once is fine, but then encouraging her to take a shower makes us uneasy all over again, and the disparities of age and gender reassert themselves. Once more we are urged to side with The Visitor and assume Patrick is the threat of the horror film we’ve signed up for. But can something as sure of itself as this really be so simple? You’ll Never Find Me factors in such second guessing to sustain a threadbare premise that requires minimal resources to perpetuate. It’s a smart bit of work.
Gradually, over a game of – appropriately enough – “bullshit”, we learn a little more about Patrick, and he comes to seem more benign, but the tension remains over what’s truth and what isn’t and the former unease quickly resumes (accompanied, of course, by Lim’s score and the crashing of the storm). It’s not long after this that You’ll Never Find Me is moved to finally play its own hand. Has convention been eschewed or simply delayed? I’ll leave that discovery up to you… What does occur is mounted with the same confidence and stark visual acuity as the protracted build up. Irrespective of the decisions made, it is aesthetically of a piece.
With limited means Bell and Allen have served up a tense little calling card for themselves here. Quite whether it’ll promote fervent love or the desire for multiple re-watches is another matter. But there’s plenty here to recommend a cursory investigation, and the confined and constricted technical flourishes present suggest whatever comes next from these filmmakers will match any greater ambition with proportionate nous.
Like the inhabitants of this claustrophobic encounter, it’ll be worth keeping a close eye on these two.
The Lost Highway Hotel 