Find her is dubbed as Stone meets Gone baby gonebut at its best, its dreamy universe feels like a distant cousin of LA confidential and keepsake. There’s a moody air to actor-writer-producer-director Nick McCallum’s ambitious noir mystery. Overall, audiences should dig the atmosphere in this story, which has just enough legs to carry itself through its nearly 90-minute runtime.
Find her comes from Kaczmarek Digital Media Group (KDMG). Mostly filmed in Basile, Louisiana and some parts of Florida, we are drawn into a trippy noir thriller right from the start. McCallum plays gloomy ex-cop Isaiah Slade, who enters a small town determined to find answers to a murdered ranch owner (Robert Marks played by John James) and his missing daughter (Sloane), who have a lot of baggage.
In a short time it becomes clear that Slade came into the picture for personal reasons. And with all the pushback he gets from quirky locals like surviving daughter Beth Marks (Mary Drew Ahrens), Garrett Warner (Garrett Andrew Ahrens), Police Chief Bill Landon (Richard Gunn), and horse rider Felix Leonard (Stelio Savante), he decides to stick around. . After all, any good cop would do that. But what is Slade’s agenda?
That’s the rope McCallum wants to keep pulling his audience on.
Writing in Find her
The deeper McCallum’s Slade character digs, the more he discovers. Layer by layer, a new element is revealed related to the overall mystery of Robert’s death and Sloane’s disappearance. One has to shake hands with McCallum because he does it all here as a writer, producer, director and actor. He knows the material well, perhaps from a personal intention he had come up with to make a series of films that revolve around someone trying to “find” her – be it a sister, a mother, a wife, etc. .
McCallum infuses ex-cop Slade with a believable veneer that smells like “I’ve been around the block.” The character, who also tells the story, is not the happiest of all souls, but this is noir. Who’s happy in noir? Slade is all about self-medication, and he’s not immune to making bad decisions. When he sleeps with Brandy Warner (Anais Lilit), the young girlfriend of pop star/Marks and daughter of Garrett Warner (Ahrens), the wealthiest landowner in the county, he reveals more of the backstory. Apparently Robert Marks was in debt and Brandy got help from her father, who, it seems, will eventually own Marks’ ranch.
The field is getting thicker.
Along the way, Slade’s voice-over takes the viewer into his own world. Lines like, “There’s always a lot of chatter in a place like this when something happens to a man like that” or “There are plenty of stories among these twisted branches,” come across well and evoke that intended ethereal noir feel. If Brandy muses, “Sometimes a girl has to forget her problems – help me forget it,” it’s effective. And noir through and through.
In general, writing in Find her Is effective. McCallum perfectly captures the mood and feel of his characters. Tommy (Rebecca Lines), Brandy’s confident and an important part of the Warner universe, could have been a throwaway character in the hands of other filmmakers. Here, McCallum gives the character believable spice — she’s worked the land, after all — without losing any level of humanity. Randal Gonzalez’s Detective Alvarez may be harsh in the story, but McCallum gives the character a few unique layers. Wicken Taylor’s Deedee delivers some comedic relief – we really get the feeling that we ran into this character in a small town somewhere.
But will the thread McCallum wants to weave get the results he’s looking for?
How do you really find her?
Find her is a nice middle ground to an above-average indie story that at times feels like it could have made for a unique streaming series, with a bigger budget and more time for some characters and subplots to breathe. Today’s audiences aren’t known for their patience in letting things simmer for too long in a movie and while Find her wants his audience to think about what they are experiencing, there is the occasional feeling that things are a beat behind.
As the film reaches its hour-long climax, key plot twists are revealed – some you may have seen coming, others more surprising. There’s a light feeling that McCallum needed to “finish things off” and tie everything into a nice creative arc at the last frame. Some dialogue and action scenes falter here and it’s obvious with the low budget McCallum had to work with. It’s not that the film feels overly rushed in the second half, it’s more like you’d like to have a little more in the first half. We don’t get enough time to fully invest in the people we live in Find her and as a result, there are times when their reactions to things seem overly dramatic. Usually that works well in a noir story and for most McCallum keeps things on a steady beat, but these brief moments force one to pause.
As the danger looms more and more towards the film’s final moments, there’s no shortage of blood. Or for that matter creative spins. Some of the characters we thought served their purpose surprise us in the last quarter of an hour. McCallum is smart and calculated in revealing these important “disclosures.” Kudos for that.
It’s encouraging. After all, McCallum wants to launch others Find her movies. In that respect, the possibilities seem endless, especially with a bigger budget and more time to let things breathe.
Find her will be available October 1 on major streaming and cable platforms.