I Will Find You Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Another classic Harlan Coben thriller, I Will Find You relies on twists, cliffhangers, and a relentless pace. There’s a great deal of logic that is overstretched, but performances and addictive pacing make it all the time fun. It is perhaps not the smartest Netflix mystery, but it is an easy one to binge.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Platform: Netflix
Episodes: 8
Language: English
Cast: Sam Worthington, Britt Lower, Erin Richards, Milo Ventimiglia
It’s a very special surrender to watch a Harlan Coben Netflix adaptation by now. You know what you’re getting yourself into. Somebody is missing. There is an innocent person in prison. The plot will twist every which way it can, and by episode 8 you have no recollection of how you got there.
Every character will have all the other characters on their radar, and they’re all secretly connected to each other. I Will Find You, the newest addition to what has become a single genre, delivers that experience and somehow, despite knowing exactly what is coming, it works its magic anyway.
The scenario is based on American actor Sam Worthington’s character, David Burroughs, who is incarcerated for the murder of his young son. Obviously, he’s innocent, and he’s been saying it for years to anyone who will listen.
Soon, his old sister-in-law Rachel (Britt Lower) arrives with a picture of a child at an amusement park with a matching birthmark to David’s now-dead son. It is a prison break, a cross-country road trip and an increasingly convoluted series of conspiracies — just about six hours of rather improbable to outright laugh-out-loud plot.
Notably, this is one of the few Coben adaptations that actually take place in the United States. The show is set in Maine, giving it slightly bigger guns and louder action beats, without any of the fundamental DNA changing. Each episode has a cliffhanger. All the characters’ speech is clipped and urgent. There is some mechanical regularity in the effect that everyone is related in some way to everyone else at runtime.
Sam Worthington buys into the script wholeheartedly, portraying David as a man living on the edge of frustration — a combination of grieving father and action hero. It works because Worthington isn’t afraid to be ridiculous and is 100% committed to every weirdball turn of events.
Britt Lower, coming off her successful endeavors on Severance, infuses Rachel with a certain intelligence that the investigative journalist plot line would lack otherwise. As David’s estranged wife Cheryl, Erin Richards’ character’s own story keeps getting more confusing and unbelievable with each episode.
It’s not that the plot fails to hold up to scrutiny — there are some genuinely interesting leaps in logic on the way to connections and explanations. It’s a show in which coincidences matter so much that you’re eventually left with no choice but to accept them. I Will Find You is definitely going to irk a viewer who demands a plot that makes sense.
And yet — the pacing really does something. Each episode ends exactly when you want to know what happens next. It was designed with the real-world viewing experience in mind, with just enough to hold onto and keep pulling the viewer along. As a vehicle for momentum, the show is a 100% success.
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The film is not an intellectually-respecting thriller. It’s a thriller that knows how to cater to your craving for progress, and it does just that throughout its 8 episodes. Whether or not you are going to watch all 8 episodes is not a hard question to answer.
Quite ludicrous, unrealistic and impossible to turn off. Recommended as proposed.
I Will Find You has been added to Netflix. All 8 episodes available.