‘Come and Find Me’ Is Good at Playing With Our Expectations

“I’m a lot of different people.”

— Claire (Annabelle Wallis), Come and Find Me

An aerial view of a nighttime cityscape. The camera zooms in to follow a bus, then a closer frame reveals a blond female passenger with headphones. A young man gets on the bus, sits a few seats behind her, and they look at each other. When they get off the bus, the man follows the woman through a deserted, graffitied wasteland, and we suspect she’s in danger. But when they arrive at the same house and each claims to live there, we realize that the whole thing is an elaborate charade, a romantic game. The atmosphere shifts from tense to comedic, as they contemplate personal photos and share their joke with us: “We must have lost our memories,” they agree.

The strengths and weaknesses of Come and Find Me are encapsulated in the opening scene. Zack Whedon’s directorial film debut is good at playing with our expectations, and competent in its genre shape shifting. But the relationship at its core is unconvincing.

On its surface, we see the usual cues. As David (Aaron Paul) gazes at Claire (Annabelle Wallis), we understand, and not only because Wallis is lovely. Like Grace Burgess, the cool, edgy undercover operative Wallis played in i>Peaky Blinders, Claire is all about what we don’t see. On the other hand, it’s not apparent why Claire would look at David. Nothing about him invites our curiosity. (Perhaps she’s moved by the quiff in his hair, maintained through all the perils that follow.) The disparity between our interest in each, however, weakens the foundation on which the plot rests.

That plot follows an ordinary guy whose girlfriend disappears without a trace. David’s search takes him from his mundane everyday life as a graphic designer to encounters with devious government agents and dodgy Russian villains. As he pieces together the clues in the photographs Claire took and replays his memories with a forensic gaze, he becomes, he says, “a regular Philip Marlow”. But we are always one step ahead of him.

Though such a knowledge gap can create anticipation and tension in a thriller, in this case, we care less rather than more about David. He emerges as a bit slow on the uptake. Any attentive viewer, for example, will have figured out Claire’s real name long before he does. Stuff has to be spelled out for David, literally.

His quest is slowed, too, by the fact that our reluctant hero, at least initially, is limited to public transportation and his bike. On one level, these restraints allow an engaging deconstruction of the masculine action hero. But again, sometimes it’s difficult to take him seriously. David looks like he’d be more at home with a bunch of kids on bikes than in a grownup world.

While David does become more canny and inventive in outwitting the bad guys, whoever they may be, this maturation process is overwhelmed by the onscreen presence of the past as the film alternates between flashbacks and the forward movement of the plot. Claire dominates all the flashbacks, to such an extent that David seems less like a hero, however deconstructed, and more like a petulant minor character. His supporting role is underline by awkward dialogue and odd scenarios, which seem unexpected, given the quality of Whedon’s previous writing, for Deadwood, Southland, and Halt and Catch Fire. Again, we’re left wondering why the two leads don’t share a more convincing intimacy.

Still, Wallis transcends the material. She has what Joseph Roach calls “it”, that indefinable but recognizable something that holds us spellbound. As David struggles to figure out the identities of those he’s trying to find, past and present, memory and desire bleed into each other. It’s hard to tell where Claire as fiction or fantasy ends and David’s reality begins. Wallis embraces these confusions and makes them productive.

To this end, Claire’s claim that “I’m a lot of different people” works both on the level of plot and character complexity. Cinematographer Stan Stiegemeier’s alternating light-and-dark visual palette frames Claire’s compelling convergence of strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience. Embodying a range of responses, from irritation to anguish to tenderness, Wallis authenticates her character’s contradictions. We believe in her shady past, even her somewhat implausible day job at a dry cleaner. But — again — it remains almost impossible to buy into the two protagonists as a “good match”.

The flashbacks only make Claire’s absence in the film’s present more palpable, and I almost abandoned viewing. But finally, in its last 15 minutes, Come and Find Me lives up to its promises. Nothing is as it seems. We are challenged to recalibrate our preconceptions of where the plot is going or has gone, and to rethink the dynamics of David and Claire’s relationship. Emotionally gripping and visually arresting, the last section of Come and Find Me resists the conventions of closure closures of gender and genre. Instead, it turns to cinematic history for an unexpected and satisfying intertextual reference. The end is worth waiting for.