You Won't Be Alone Review: Inventive Folk Horror Is Ambitious To A Fault
You Won't Be Alone is built on a delicate balance of contradictions. Writer-director Goran Stolevski's feature debut straddles the line between horror film and life-affirming coming-of-age drama, drawing on age-old folk traditions to tell a story that is at times enthrallingly new. That ambitiousness is its greatest asset; it is also, fittingly, its biggest flaw. As strong as the movie can be when committed to the specificity of its characters and setting, it asks too many of the big, unanswerable questions at the heart of the human condition, and the further You Won't Be Alone reaches for the universal, the more chafing its grip on the viewer becomes.
Set in the 19th century Macedonian countryside, the story begins, as any fairy tale might, with a misbegotten bargain. Finding her house invaded by a witch (or "Wolf-Eateress") known as Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), who has come to feed on her newborn, a mother strikes a desperate deal: if she spares the infant, when the child turns 16, Maria can claim her as the daughter she has always wanted. The witch agrees but, out of a cruel desire to have their agreement struck in blood, leaves the baby mute. A quick flash-forward reveals the woman's bid to outsmart her mythical tormentor by raising the girl in a hallowed cave was all for naught, and when the teenaged Nevena (Sara Klimoska) is finally let out into the wider world, it is as a witch herself.
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This prologue promises a story more firmly rooted in horror than the one You Won't Be Alone has to tell, and viewers will come to associate this feeling with Old Maid Maria's presence. The elder witch is a complex, tragic, even sympathetic
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