Review of "You Won't Be Alone," a poetic and incredibly beautiful horror story about a witch
Terrence Malick's The Winds meet Robert Eggers' witch in the Macedonian fields.
This year's Sundance Independent Film Festival (in fact, every year) was particularly distinguished by films with a frightening focus: Mimi Cave's cannibal thriller Fresh, Hannah Bergholm's body horror Scramble, Chloe Okuno's paranoia film The Watcher and Australian director Goran Stolewski's peculiar poem on blood. Each of the pictures flirts with the framework of the genre in its own way, but it was "You Will Not Be Alone" that married a union doomedly unequal: Terrence Malick's melancholy fell in love without looking back with Robert Eggers' mythic rites of passage.
It begins with witchcraft: long ago, in a peasant village in Macedonia, parents feared for their children - a witch (Anamaria Marinka) with burned skin could leave a mark on their child's body or drink blood from their ruddy cheeks. Nevena's mother begs for mercy and tries to come to an agreement with the dangerous guest: her daughter will succeed the sorceress when she turns 16, but in the meantime the infant will have no marks. The witch cannot be trusted at her word: devoid of language, Nevena (Sara Klimovska) henceforth lives in a cave where no one will find the baby - neither the witch, nor the villagers, nor the sunlight. Years later, the girl emerges into the light and tries to learn how to live for the first time.
Goran Stolewski's poetry is made up of refrains, and magic is made up of swallowing other people's flesh. Nevena consumes the entrails of the murdered and acquires a new body: a young mother, a shaggy dog, a blond maiden or a broad-shouldered peasant. A detailed retelling kills the beauty of the idea: the young witch's soul goes on tour through lives she never had and probably never will have afterwards. The girl learns to laugh, eat, pour water from her eyes, love, and... endure. The momentary creation of being in simple things-the wind in her hair, the talk of the washerwomen, the hay on the hem of her skirt, the cry of a baby. To each discovery, the fear of being discovered breathes down her back: the wolf-eating sorceress is looking for her ward, but is in no hurry to return from her bizarre wanderings. Besides miracles, the world is full of pain, just as ingenuous and straightforward: soon Nevena herself will want to get away from the human tribe.
"Your place is inside his palm," the parade of creaturely discoveries inevitably arrives at the chasm between the masculine and the feminine. Stolewski remotely observes the socialization of his adult newborn. The familiar in society turns unnatural: Nevena counts purple bruises on her skin (in the body of the truly magical Noomi Rapace), reacts aggressively to her first physical intimacy, tries to get along in a male body, and learns the story of her parent, old Maria. Violence more often than gestures of love becomes a language understood by the mute Nevena, who only swallows new pain. At the same time, "You Will Not Be Alone" is contemplative by nature; Goran Stolewski offers no conclusions or morals: reflection is replaced by an outsider's view. But the viewer is not alone during the journey: at times the sound space is filled by Nevena's voice, who speaks about what she has seen, heard and felt with her skin.
With his stylistic fidelity to Malick's academy, both in his camera movements, his faces, and the power of nature, Stolewski cannot be called an arrogant epigone. Whereas Terrence strives all the time upward, the matter of his paintings only pushes off the ground, Goran, by contrast, stands firmly on the ground. "You Will Not Be Alone" is an attempt to make a cast of a passing (or already gone) texture: work on the ground, life and death, light without electricity and other little things that increasingly act as background attributes of costume cinema, but do not exist in isolation from it. Stolewski, who not only directed but also scripted the picture, composed a tender pastoral with inclusions of unbearably painful and repulsively violent scenes, both of which are born under a cover of genuine naturalness. It is likely that this picture will return to everyone's lips closer to the year's final lists: the melody of "You Won't Be Alone" leaves a special imprint on the heart of the watcher, it is hard to forget.
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