You’ll Never Find Me is a new psychological horror thriller film from Australia, recently released on Shudder, and gaining popularity as a tight-knit chamber drama. The plot presents the arrival of an unnamed young woman, known only as the Visitor, at the mobile home of a man named Patrick, situated in a slightly shady trailer park. It is their mutual distrust and underlying fear of each other that make up most of You’ll Never Find Me, until it further springs up with twists, making it an even more chilling watch.
Spoiler Alert
How do Patrick and the Visitor meet each other?
You’ll Never Find Me begins inside the mobile home of a man later identified as Patrick, who also happens to be the central character of the film. Patrick is used to a life of loneliness, as he has spent a significant portion of his life all by himself, drinking away his pains or seemingly totally numb to them. He is also quite accustomed to the stormy weather outside and is not perturbed by the bangs and noises caused by the wind until there is a loud knock on the door of his house. Patrick does not pay much heed to it and simply shouts at whoever is outside to just go away and leave him alone. After all, the man lives in a shady trailer park where most people hide their real identities, and a few of the troublesome kids always make him the brunt of their cruel jokes. Patrick believes the knock to be part of the kids’ joke, and so he does not respond. However, when the noise continues, and more importantly, when someone speaks from the outside, he does open the door to find a young woman standing at his doorway.
The unnamed woman asks for Patrick’s help in this horrid storm, as she needs a lift to the nearby town and has no other option than to go knocking on strangers’ doors in such weather. When asked about where she is coming from or how she got stuck in the storm, the woman gives only a few vague and suspicious-sounding answers. She tells Patrick that she had been to the bar having a few drinks and then admits having gone to the beach and falling asleep there when the man spots her swimming clothes. None of her answers are really straight or convincing, and her sudden emergence at such a late hour is also something that alarms Patrick. To top it all off, her face seems familiar to Patrick, even though he cannot place where he saw her earlier, and the woman does not help in figuring out the mystery either. Nonetheless, Patrick lets the woman come into his house, giving her shelter from the rain and warm clothes and drinks, but the environment inside the trailer is really not very easy.
Patrick’s suggestions and advice to the woman do come off as slightly forceful and manipulative, as he tells her that his car needs repair, and so he would just take her to the nearest pay phone. He then asks her to change her wet clothes, make herself comfortable, and even goes on to offer her food and drink. While these actions seem like those of a helpful host, the fact that Patrick almost forces her into these decisions without really giving her any choice about them makes him look quite strange. The young woman, who remains unnamed throughout the film and is only referred to as the Visitor, is scared that she has stepped into some trouble that is more threatening than the storm outside, but she also cannot act on her impulses for the most part. She does, however, refuse to eat the soup that Patrick prepares for her and throws it into one of the boots nearby, but Patrick spots this and is hurt by the distrust. But the lack of belief in each other’s stories is mutual on both sides, as it seems increasingly possible that both have something to hide about their past and their true selves. The basic premise of You’ll Never Find Me lies in this very distrust and doubt of Patrick and the Visitor, who meet each other by coincidence because of the rough weather.
How do the Visitor’s fears come true?
Once the Visitor accepts her fate that she has to spend some time with Patrick at his mobile home no matter what, she tries to calm the tense scenario by acting friendly. She apologizes for having thrown the soup away, and then also tries to know more about her host as well. The fact that seems most odd to the woman is Patrick’s loneliness and his supposed unaffected attitude at having to spend life all by himself. Eventually, Patrick opens up to her, even later on telling her that he has been truly enjoying the opportunity to speak with someone else. He tells her that the dress that she has been given to wear, along with some of the earrings and jewelry in the bathroom, belonged to an ex-girlfriend. But this story changes later on when Patrick says that they actually belonged to his wife, who had died a few years ago from some addiction-related issues, leaving him all alone in the world.
Although the woman pretends to believe the stories, along with everything else Patrick has been telling her, she does not seem very convinced and clearly keeps her reservations against her host. In one instance, after the electricity inside the house goes out, the two go to try and fix the fuse and wires inside the place. At this time, the Visitor spots some blood on the back of Patrick, even though it does not seem to be from any injury or cut on his body. She also sees a hammer among his tools, which appear to be covered in blood for a moment, but the young woman decides to keep up her friendly pretensions. She simply tells Patrick about the blood, making it seem as if she is concerned for his well-being, and she does not do anything about the hammer at all. Sometime later, she finds a pair of earrings in the bathroom that are clearly very similar to the ones she owned, and this makes the matter even stranger. The Visitor lashes out against Patrick, calling him a thief, suggesting that the man had stolen her earrings, and demanding to leave the place.
However, she also quickly realizes that the stormy weather outside and the sheer distance of the place from any other locality or settlement have truly left her stranded. Therefore, the Visitor once again mends her relationship with Patrick, and the two now sit down to play cards. However, a massive twist in the tale arrives when Patrick is startled by the sound of a car and rushes out to check who it is. In this while, the woman starts exploring the rest of the house when she suddenly sees the dead body of a woman lying in a bathtub inside Patrick’s bathroom. This is enough to make all her nightmares and fears come true, for she is genuinely in an extremely troublesome situation.
In reality, Patrick is actually a serial killer who lures and kidnaps young women to bring them to his house and kill them. Whether he does anything sexual with them is left unclear, but his main disgusting aim is to kill the women and keep some trophies of them, mostly in the form of earrings, jewelry, or clothes worn by them at the time. After the revelation, Patrick himself states that his first murder got him hooked on the act, and he went on committing more killings while hiding out at the mobile home in the trailer park for all this while. The remote location and the shady nature of the neighbors have ensured that the police have not been able to find Patrick for this long. But the man has always been scared of finally being caught, and he believes that the police will come to his place searching for the serial killer any day now. When he hears imaginary cars outside the trailer park, he assumes them to be police cars and, therefore, hurries out to check whether his punishment is finally on the way. Coming to the modus operandi of Patrick, he would befriend young women at bars or even on the road, bring them back to his house, and give them a heavy dose of GHB drug, which would swiftly make them fall unconscious.
While talking about his wife, Patrick mentioned how he had met her for the first time outside a drug store and how she had asked for some chips and a lift from her. It is now revealed that this was how he met his latest victim, the woman whose body is still inside his house, and he passed off the experience as a really loving and profound one shared between him and his non-existent wife. There is also some psychological reasoning behind Patrick’s string of murders, as he holds the women responsible for coming into his life and being his victims, considering them to have been asked to be killed by him.
What is the Visitor’s real identity?
Once the secret motive and nature of Patrick are revealed, he attacks the Visitor as well, who finds herself in a helpless situation despite figuring out that her host is a murderer. She is simply overpowered by Patrick, who forcibly makes her drink the same GHB dose that he used on his other victims, and this makes the woman gradually lose consciousness. As a result, she is also struck down by the killer, who makes her his latest victim. However, You’ll Never Find Me brings out the final major twist only at this point, as it is revealed that the young woman known as the Visitor was never really present at the scene in reality.
The Visitor was part of Patrick’s imagination and his guilt-ridden conscience, which made him believe that a certain punishment was surely coming his way. In fact, the young woman had been the very first victim of the man whom he had met on the road as she had asked for a lift in his car. A scene that is repeatedly shown in glimpses throughout the film, in which the inside of a car on a rainy day is seen, is actually from the very first murder of Patrick. He had brought her back to his house and had killed her with the hammer, which is why the woman saw flashes of blood on the hammer, as well as on her head. This is also the reason why the Visitor finds similar earrings as hers inside the bathroom of the man, for he had already murdered her and had kept her jewelry as a reminder. Similarly, this is the reason behind Patrick finding her face so familiar and yet not being able to place it in memory since he admits that he hardly remembered the faces of his victims.
The presence of the Visitor can be seen as a ghostly appearance, which had come to take revenge against the man and eventually did so by forcibly making him drink the GHB drug solution. But in terms of a psychological thriller, it seems more likely that the presence of the Visitor was all inside the guilt-ridden mind of Patrick, who finally loses control over his conscience, and the latter takes over, making him kill himself by drinking the drug solution.
During You’ll Never Find Me‘s ending, Patrick comes out of his nightmare and is seen all alone once again, sitting and drinking inside his mobile house. There is a knock on his door, but when he goes to check who has come, he finds the neighborhood kids playing their usual pranks on him. Patrick had committed his last murder only a few hours earlier, and it is the same woman whose body is seen lying in the bathtub. But in his delirious state, the man had indeed drunk the GHB solution, which gradually took away his life, and in the last scene, he is heard choking to death from the outside of the mobile home.
