You Won’t Be Alone
Noomi Rapace experiences the beauty and cruelty of life in Goran Stolevski’s You Won't Be Alone.
A stunningly beautiful fairytale about the human experience, You Won’t Be Alone isn’t your average tale of witches and death. It’s gory to be sure. If you don’t have a strong stomach for viscera, this is not the movie for you. But the horror elements are secondary to the dreamy pastoral quality of the filmmaking. You Won’t Be Alone is much closer to the fairytales of old—the ones where Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes to fit into the glass slipper—than to anything you’d find from Disney.
And that’s clearly writer/director Goran Stolevski’s vision. His feature debut is a horror story reimagined in the style of Terrence Malick. And this meditative, impressionist way of telling a story fits the character of Nevena (who has little experience of the witch or human world) beautifully. Stolevski never shies away from the gruesome and horrific sides of life—the women of the village dismiss Nevena’s odd quirks as a result of her husband beating her too frequently—but he also examines what makes humanity so compelling.
