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"You Won't Be Alone" movie still
You Won't Be Alone
Don’t come to You Won’t Be Alone expecting a conventional movie narrative. Instead of telling its story prosaically, You Won’t Be Alone is a visual poem set in forested, mountainous Macedonia during the 19th century around a village where the wheel was the most recent form of new technology. And even wheels are scarce in this art house horror film by Goran Stolevski, an Australian filmmaker of Macedonian heritage.
The story concerns the evil Old Maid Maria, whose dead soul is covered by a shriveled parchment skin. Although the villagers call her a witch, properly speaking, she’s a shapeshifting vampire. Entering the village undetected in the form of a cat (the camera follows low-to-the-ground), Maria materializes in the hovel of a new mother, demanding Nevena, the woman’s screaming newborn. The terrified mother negotiates a covenant in blood to give Nevena to Maria once the child turns 16. Apparently hoping to keep her hidden, the mother conceals Nevena, raising her in a cavern, but Maria claims her when the time comes.
You Won’t Be Alone is covered in blood. Maria feeds on the blood of animals and humans and after changing Nevena into something like her, the young girl learns not only to sustain herself on the blood of others but to kill and take possession of her victims’ bodies. She becomes a dog, a young man and a young girl again, growing into womanhood as the story unfolds.
The editing flips from frame to frame, incident to incident, yet the film’s rhythm remains somehow tied to rural life without even horses, only donkeys with bells jangling as they plod under their burdens. You Won’t Be Alone is a vivid montage of impoverished premodernity. The villagers live in fieldstone huts with dirt floors; they raise sheep and spin yarn to make their clothes; they feed the chickens and pigs they will kill to eat. Their lives are yoked to the ground, and they must yank their sustenance from the unpromising Earth.
The old women tell tales by the flickering hearth of Old Maid Maria, the victim of unspeakable things centuries before when the Turks were exterminating entire villages along the rough hillsides. Maria, the spawn of an unholy act, haunts Nevena throughout her life. Unlike Maria, Nevena has a conscience.
The dialogue is apparently in archaic Macedonian, translated in Yoda-like subtitles that enhance the strangeness of Nevena’s life. She is a potentially ageless outsider experiencing a terrible, wondrous series of sensations. You Won’t Be Alone’s international cast includes Sweden’s Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) playing one of Nevena’s incarnations.
You Won’t Be Alone is playing at the Downer Theater.
