You Won't Be Alone

 0/4

Starring: Sara Klimoska, Anamaria Marinca, Alice Englert, Noomi Rapace

Rated R for Violence and Gore, Sexual Content, Graphic Nudity, and Sexual Assault

The longer I do this film critic thing, the less patience I have for movies like "You Won't Be Alone."  This is pretentious, unpleasant swill passing itself off as existential horror.  It wants to be "above" a standard horror flick, and instead illustrate some greater truth.  The problem is that it doesn't say anything original or profound, and writer/director Goran Stolevski seems to be daring his viewers to stay awake.  Perhaps so he can laud them for "getting" his film.

If nothing else, the film can boast a clever conceit.  Though Stolevski is such a bad storyteller that I had to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia to figure out what I just saw.  Maria (Marinca) is a witch who has just selected her next victim: an infant she will turn into a witch.  Desperate, the child's mother begs her to hold off until she is sixteen.  Maria agrees, although not before robbing the child of her ability to speak.  The mother hides the child in a cave to protect her from the witch, but Maria isn't so easily duped.  After killing her mother, Maria takes the child, Nevena (Klimoska), as her protege.  Nevena isn't a willing pupil, and escapes Maria's grasp, intending to live as a normal woman.  Maria doubts this is possible and is always watching to foil Nevena's attempts.

Had Stolevski been more concerned with telling a story than showing off, the film might have worked.  Unfortunately, his desire to be seen as an "artist" and an "auteur" proved too great.  Yes, this is one of those movies, where dialogue and character development are sidelined by a whispering voice over spewing inane babble and images of the minutiae.  There is a certain kind of viewer who drools over this sort of thing, but I'm not one of them.  If you're the kind of viewer that thinks someone saying "Are bees female?" is possible to take seriously, this movie is for you.  That may or may not be a direct quote, but either way, it goes to show you just how fatally misconceived this film is.

Stolevski has a good cast of actresses, including the talented (if overpraised) Noomi Rapace and the underrated Anamaria Marinca.  But their talents aren't used here.  They're tools so Stolevski can inflate his ego and call himself an "artist."  No one, except Marinca, has a consistent character to play.  The idea that a witch can take the form of her victims after killing them isn't terribly original, but it is pregnant with possibilities.

The film is a waste of time, space and money.  It's not interesting, nor insightful, nor scary.  It has a lot of gore and some gratuitous sex and nudity, but if that's you're goal, I can recommend several excellent alternatives to this piece of crap.  This movie is so bad that the only interesting things about it are the depictions of life in rural Macedonia a century and a half ago.

I've gotten more entertainment sitting on the toilet.

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