Parents' Guide to

Come and Find Me

By Brian Costello, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

Some graphic violence, language in thriller-mystery.

Movie R 2016 112 minutes
Come and Find Me Poster Image

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What's the Story?

In COME AND FIND ME, graphic designer David (Aaron Paul) lives happily with his girlfriend Claire (Annabelle Wallis), a photographer, in their Los Angeles home. One day, Claire vanishes without a trace. The police are unable to find any leads, and while he fears the worst, the best-case scenario in David's mind is that she simply left him and didn't want to be contacted. Claire's college friend Buck comes to town to try to console David, and the morning after a bender, David leaves Buck in his house while he tells him he needs to run errands. Instead, David rides the bus and reminisces about his past with Claire, and gets home earlier than what he told Buck. When David opens the door, he finds that Buck is literally tearing the house apart in search of something, and when David confronts him, Buck knocks him out with a hammer. When David comes to, the police tell David that there are no records of Claire having attended college, or even of her having grown up in her hometown of Salt Lake City, and there are also no records of Buck's existence. While searching the house to figure out what Buck was looking for, David goes into the garden and finds a buried collection of photos. These photos appear to be hidden-camera footage of suspicious characters conducting business of some kind. After a thorough examination of the photos, David is able to track the location to a junkyard, where he has an unpleasant altercation with Russian mobsters who tell him to forget about Claire and move on. But it's now too late, as this altercation leads to an invasion of David's home, and a desperate search that leads David to Vancouver, where David begins to understand that Claire not who she said she was.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

There's enough action, suspense, and even romance to overcome the increasing skepticism that begins to overwhelm the movie's third act. Come and Find Me is an engaging story of a man who discovers that his girlfriend/love of his life was nothing like the person he thought she was as he tries to solve the mystery of her sudden disappearance. The movie's opening scene, in which Aaron Paul's character seems to be stalking/following Annabelle Wallis' character from the bus stop, sets up the illusions and deception to come, and the movie's twists don't disappoint, despite interactions with the usual bad guys seen in movies like these (i.e., Russian mobsters, shady US government operatives). The acting and dialogue are solid throughout, as Paul and Wallis navigate not only the moments of extreme action and violence, but also moments of a young couple falling in love.

These moments of Paul's and Wallis' characters meeting and falling in love, shown in flashback scenes, may annoy those looking for more of a straightforward in-the-moment action movie, but these scenes reveal the moments in which Claire (Wallis' character), in David's (Paul's character) hindsight, is definitely not the quirky artsy photographer from Salt Lake City that she says she is. All in all, it works, and fortunately ends before wearing out its welcome and/or suspension of disbelief. These flashbacks help to make this movie more than standard action movie fare. It shows enough respect for the audience to actually develop the characters, rather than the typical move of making the characters the most shopworn of archetypes ("streetwise cop," "world-weary detective," etc.), and that alone makes this worthwhile.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about thrillers like Come and Find Me. How does this compare to other thrillers you've seen?

  • Did the violence seem necessary to the story, or did it seem excessive? Why?

  • What are some of the ways in which the movie ratcheted up the mystery and suspense behind Claire's disappearance?

Movie Details

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