Isaiah Slade arrives in a small Southern town with a bottle for company and a voice that never stops narrating. That is the opening of Find Her, the 2022 neo-noir written, produced, directed by and starring Nick McCallum. MovieWeb sums it up as Brick meets Gone Baby Gone, then adds that at its best the film feels like a distant cousin to L.A. Confidential and Memento. The film does not earn those names, and it doesn’t need to. This is an independent picture of nearly 90 minutes from Kaczmarek Digital Media Group, and what it has is a mood of its own. The mood is what carries it.

The story is simple to state. Slade, an ex-cop, comes looking for answers about a murdered ranch owner, Robert Marks (John James), and his missing daughter, Sloane. The locals push back: Beth Marks (Mary Drew Ahrens), Garrett Warner (Garrett Andrew Ahrens), Chief Bill Landon (Richard Gunn) and the horseman Felix Leonard (Stelio Savante). That pushback is the reason he stays, and it also tells us he didn’t come only out of professional duty. As MovieWeb puts it, it becomes evident in a short span that Slade entered the picture for personal reasons. The film then spends its running time revealing what those reasons are, and that question keeps the plot moving even when the scenes themselves are quiet.

McCallum plays Slade as a man who has been around the block, and MovieWeb credits him with a believable veneer of exactly that. He self-medicates, he makes poor decisions, and he narrates. The voiceover is the film’s most traditional device, with lines such as “There’s always a lot of chatter in a place like this when something happens to a man like that” and “There’s plenty of stories between these twisted branches.” They are mannered, and they are meant to be. They announce the genre in the first minutes and set the register for everything after: fatalistic, a little poetic, wary of anyone who speaks too quickly.

The weakness is the man at the centre. Blazing Minds finds that Slade’s unwavering deadpan makes it difficult to feel much for him, and that his vulnerabilities are never fleshed out enough to earn our empathy. I agree. A guarded hero is standard in noir, but the guardedness has to cover something we can sense, and here it mostly covers more guardedness. The same reviewer notes that Slade, as an outsider, keeps a distance from the community that never quite closes. That distance belongs to the character, but it turns the town into a row of obstacles instead of a place with its own history. Writing, directing, producing and acting in the same film may explain some of this: the lead is seen from the inside by the man who made him, and the film never steps back far enough to question him.

The plot opens up through Brandy Warner (Anais Lilit), a wannabe pop star, the young girlfriend of Marks and the daughter of Garrett Warner, the wealthiest landowner in the county. After Slade sleeps with her, he learns that Marks was in debt, that Brandy got help from her father, and that her father will apparently end up owning the ranch. This is where the money motive finally lands, and it shows Slade’s habit of poor decisions paying off in information. Lilit gets the livelier role. Blazing Minds singles her out, along with Rebecca Lines as Tommy, the matriarchal surrogate aunt, for bringing energy and dynamism to their parts. Next to a protagonist who barely lets his face move, those two are the performances you notice.

The look of the film is its best argument. Evan Zissimopulos’ cinematography is crisp, and Blazing Minds points to its use of low sunlight casting long shadows. The film was shot in Louisiana and Florida, mostly in Basile, and the sharply defined colours and vast, almost glacial landscapes, in Blazing Minds’ phrase, make the South feel cool and foreboding instead of humid and lazy. It is a smart choice. A noir that plays out in daylight needs some other way to create threat, and the long shadows supply it without a single rainy street.

The structure is straightforward, and that is where opinions will divide. Blazing Minds calls the storytelling evenly paced and easy to follow whatever the twists, and credits its refreshing simplicity, while warning that the undeviating chronological telling can seem plodding or procedural to stricter noir fans who want more ambiguity and a non-linear narrative. MovieWeb is kinder: it says the tale has just enough legs to carry itself, and that each layer of the mystery brings some new element about Marks’ death and Sloane’s disappearance. The two verdicts describe the same film from opposite ends. It reveals its secrets in order, one conversation after another, and it never tricks the viewer. The Memento comparison promises a puzzle that this film doesn’t build.

McCallum’s own taste for the genre is easy to read. In a September 2022 interview he said he loves noir in general and called Chinatown a one-of-a-kind movie he can always have on in the background. MovieWeb adds that he may have set out to make a series of films about somebody trying to find her, whether a sister, a mother or a wife. That ambition explains the title and the film’s single-minded drive. It also means the picture asks to be judged on its mood and its mystery, because the search itself is the subject and the particulars of this case matter less than the habit of looking.

So Find Her is uneven. It has a convincing look, a pair of lively supporting turns and a mystery that holds interest for its short runtime. It also has a lead who keeps the audience at arm’s length and a plot that moves in a straight line. Viewers who like their noir moody and easy to follow will get what they came for. Those who want the labyrinths of the films it invokes should look elsewhere.