Each year there’s always a growing excitement for the start of FrightFest but opening with You’ll Never Find Me quickly quells that buzz.
This part of the Glasgow Film Festival is known for being completely different to the rest of the festival; the films are often a mix of absurd and crazy, a different kind of audience and very much its own thing with a unique personality. You are never short of interesting films even if they are generally poor – they will at least have a few moments throughout that spark joy.
So there is always an expectation that FrightFest’s opening gambit will be what sets the tone for the rest of the weekend. This is one of many issues with You’ll Never Find Me, it’s not absurd nor crazy and barely interesting. Much to the relief of FrightFest it certainly didn’t represent the festival as a whole with some great films screening.
It’s rare for films to be around that 90 minute mark and you will quickly find despite its short runtime this feels like it goes on for much, much longer.
A directing team of Josiah Allen and Indianna Bell, with the latter on writing duties, this Australian film is set in a trailer park where on a stormy night we are introduced to Patrick (Brendan Rock) who finds a stranger knocking at his door in the dead of night in the form of “The Visitor” (Jordan Cowan). Like these two characters we are then stuck in the trailer for the duration.
From the get-go Allen and Bell set an atmosphere that is mysterious and do well to build some suspense as we begin to see more of these characters. When you have a film set in one confined location there needs to be enough to keep you captivated.
But instead we get an excess of philosophical, melancholic, soliloquies on life that quickly dismantles all of that great suspense. You are waiting for something to happen and just as you think it might, it doesn’t and this happens repeatedly.
We are taken on a journey that takes far too long to get going and by the time the story picks up you are that exhausted it is hard to then re-engage.
Despite their best efforts to inject some life into the film both Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan do well to create that uneasy feeling between their characters to create some tension.
It all feels like it is trying to be too clever and over-complicates what could have been a simple, well told, story. At its core there is great potential and it would have benefitted from adjustments and re-writes to the screenplay.
