You'll Never Find Me * *

Shining a light on.... nothing much!

You'll Never Find Me.  Actually, I did - and I wish I hadn't!

Cobbled together from a half-baked script, it doesn't know where it's going or how to get there. The dialogue is atrocious.  It's like a play written for the local amateur theatre group, then adapted for the screen.

As it progresses it just gets noisier and more confused and bloodier and it still doesn't know where it's going. 

The sound is maddening. Literally. It's like they told the sound department: "It's yours. Go Nuts".  So they did.  It never shuts up.  There is virtually no contrast. It doesn't creep into a scene undermining us, because it's always there, shaking the walls.

The story is the old "knock on the door in the night" scenario. Nothing wrong with that.  It's worked in a thousand other horror films. Every reason  it can work again.  But this doesn't.  

Set in an "on-site home" in a caravan park.  Outside a horrendous storm rages.  A man alone answers the door. A cold and wet young woman looking for help.  He reluctantly lets her in.  We've seen this set up a hundred times before, but okay, let's get it on!

Then everything grinds down to a low, low gear.  It creaks and groans as they interact with this slow, slow, slow, wearying, pedestrian dialogue. Then there is the meditative "please consider" cinematography.  Sometimes it's like watching a TV ad to promote a product. 

Okay, we catch on that both these people are telling lies, but it's like, "So What?" There does not seem to be any menacing aspect to their dishonesty, and anyway, what's her motivation for lying?

Have you ever been in a meeting and someone is taking hours to say something or show something and you find yourself doing that winding "move it along" gesture? Well I literally did that whilst watching this.  (Had to apologise to the person next to me, but he just nodded and agreed.)

After a while, things get dangerous, as they should, but it's confusing about what is happening - or indeed if it's happening at all.  It just gets noisier and noisier and bloodier and more populated with victims.  Are they even supposed to be real?  You get the impression they just thought, let's make it noisy and bloody and we got ourselves a horror movie.  No you haven't. 

In the end, the explanation for its ambiguity is inexcusably bad. It's all in the mind. Oh pulleeeze!

Apparently its rating quite well. But for me it was dull and disappointing.