You Won’t Be Alone – first-look review | Little White Lies

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You Won’t Be Alone – first-look review

26 Jan 2022

A woman with dark hair and a serious expression, looking up at the camera.
A woman with dark hair and a serious expression, looking up at the camera.
Goran Stolesvs­ki weaves a strange and sump­tu­ous tale of wom­an­hood against the back­drop of ancient Macedonia.

A hor­ror of its own design, Goran Stolesvski’s You Won’t Be Alone is a film that is both flu­id and oneir­ic. The Aus­tralian direc­tor returns to his Mace­don­ian ori­gins for folk­lore and fem­i­nin­i­ty to tell the tale of a mythi­cised wolfeater­ess’ from hun­dreds of years ago who comes back to exact her revenge for the hor­ri­ble things she endured in the same coun­try­side vil­lage: this entails the blood pact she makes with a woman whose infant daugh­ter she has decid­ed to take as her fledg­ling sor­cer­ess, and she thus cuts off the baby’s tongue as a promise for her return when the baby turns 16. Through the wolfeater­ess’ actions, the film piv­ots to tell the sto­ry of her vic­tim — Neve­na — who lives her entire life mute and in a cave with her moth­er until she is inevitably whisked away by the witch when the time comes to trans­form her.

When Neve­na leaves the cave under the witch’s gaze (where she remains for the entire film, lest she not for­get), she begins to expe­ri­ence life for the very first time, but with­out the abil­i­ty to speak about it. The witch’s spit, turn­ing Neve­na into a witch her­self, allows Neve­na to take on dif­fer­ent skins after she mur­ders the peo­ple once inhab­it­ed them, and this abil­i­ty allows her walk in anyone’s shoes, so to speak. From a film­mak­ing per­spec­tive, this allows for the col­lab­o­ra­tion of many dif­fer­ent actors to embody the same char­ac­ter, from Sara Klimos­ka and Noo­mi Rapace, amongst oth­ers, and the results are seam­less­ly phan­tas­magor­i­cal. This ulti­mate­ly gives way to a gor­geous tale of iden­ti­ty and the inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty of peo­ple — what is it like to feel some­thing for the very first time, when you had nev­er ever heard about it before? How does it feel to be under the gaze of oth­ers for the very first time?

In many ways, You Won’t Be Alone is a com­ing-of-age sto­ry, but in the same way that is a hor­ror; Stolevski’s debut fea­ture tends to eschew clas­sic gen­res in favour of a more dis­tinc­tive, idiomat­ic kind of sto­ry­telling. It doesn’t lean fur­ther into the ele­ments of hor­ror more than is nec­es­sary to craft the plot, and thus the mes­sage; it isn’t over­ly empath­ic or self-indul­gent for the sake of telling a tale of someone’s self-dis­cov­ery. Instead, You Won’t Be Alone is an organ­ic med­i­ta­tion, if not a bit too slow, on how we craft iden­ti­ty as human beings, and how our imme­di­ate sur­round­ings play a key role in this process. The score, as well the whis­per­ing voice over as Neve­na acts and reacts to the world around her, are both delight­ful touch­es on an already empa­thet­ic film.

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