Tribeca 2025 Review: MAN FINDS TAPE, A Found Footage Odyssey From The Heart Of Texas

The sleepy Texas town of Larkin falls prey to an unseen malevolent entity in Man Finds Tape, the debut feature from writer/director duo Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall, premiering at Tribeca this week.

Lynn Page (Kelsey Pribilski) left her small town life in rural Texas years ago, but with her brother Lucas (William Magnuson) still hanging in there, she’s never managed to completely sever the ties to her past. When Lynn gets a call from her brother to help him investigate a mystery that gets stranger with every new revelation, she hesitantly returns. Something strange is happening, people are dying, time is missing, and no one in town can remember a thing. But perhaps her time away can give her a perspective none of the locals have.

Man Finds Tape is a clever hybrid of the found footage and mockumentary forms, blending the documentary style of something like Lake Mungo with a contemporaneous examination of the mystery of Larkin through talking head interviews and smart editing. The title of the film refers to the social media phenomenon birthed when Lucas discovers a MiniDV tape with footage of a faceless man visiting him in his bedroom when he was a child. Nothing overtly untoward happens in the video, but it is creepy as hell, and he has a strong feeling that it must be connected to the deaths around town.

Helpfully, the Page family are the go-to video mavens of Larkin, Texas, having not only installed the vast majority of security cameras around town, but also setting up the local church’s online presence. Lynn and Lucas’s parents were behind every camera in town, and all that footage comes into play throughout the film.

As one might expect with any small town, everyone knows everyone else, but that just makes the local secrets bury themselves deeper to avoid detection. The local pastor, Reverend Endicott Carr (John Gholson), watches over his congregation like a hawk, but there is something behind his sermons that Lynn and Lucas cannot really figure out. Then there is The Stranger (Brian Villalobos), an unknown figure who keeps showing up at the scenes of these unexplained deaths.

It is a complex film, which makes it more than a little difficult to write about without spoiling too much of the surprise, but it is never dull. Beyond the scares and careful characterizations, there is also a running commentary about the ways in which secluded communities tend to look the other way when things get unpleasant. If a tree falls and no one is there to witness it, did it even happen? If a man gets run over in broad daylight on a street filled with people, was there even a crime?

Man Finds Tape is a solid entry into a horror subgenre that often feels tapped out. The mass of found footage films is a minefield that often feels like it is more mine than field, but Hall and Gandersman have delivered a gripping mystery that avoids a lot of the pitfalls of lesser films. Man Finds Tape is pacey, it’s scary, and it is never boring. Solid performances from some of Texas’s top indie acting talent bolster a well-crafted script to put Man Finds Tape on the list of 2025’s most fun horror discoveries.

The film enjoys its world premiere at Tribeca 2025.