‘You Won’t Be Alone’: a queasy calling card for Macedonian horror
As far as horror movie titles go, You Won’t Be Alone is right up there with Let the Right One In, and It Follows in setting an evocative, terrifying tone from the get-go. But this 2022 Macedonian movie is far more than a clever title, and if you can stomach a complete viewing, you’ll find that it’s working on a dizzying number of thematic and cinematic levels.
Written and directed by Goran Stolevski, You Won’t Be Alone is set in a 19th-century Macedonian village and follows a girl named Nevena who is kidnapped and transformed into a witch by a witch named Maria. Reluctant to use her new form for violence, she instead seeks to learn more about the human world. When she accidentally kills a peasant, she discovers that she can assume the forms of the people she kills, offering her a new opportunity to explore what it means to be human.
The premise is simple enough, but the execution is much more gruesome than it sounds. In order to transform into the creature she has just killed, Nevena must remove its entrails. And in order to transform Nevena into a witch in the first place, Maria has to kill a donkey and spit its blood into a wound in the girl’s chest. But in a film about tactility — about living in someone else’s skin — it takes that concept to its most visceral extent. Sexuality, excruciating pain, physical labour, and the sensual pleasures of water, sunlight, and breeze are all part of Nevena’s experience, not just the gruesome violence she takes out on others.
Stolevski said he wanted to make a movie based on Macedonian folklore about witches but found that most of the stories revolved around women being chastened and cowed into their supposedly rightful places, not about powerful creatures exploring the pleasures and pain of womanhood. In the film, being a witch means being cut off from the world, a terrible curse that makes you a pariah and a predator. Nevena chooses to break free from this burden and, in contrast with Maria, tries to assimilate with humans until, at last, she can live among them.
The gruesomeness of You Won’t Be Alone is stomach-churning, but it’s contrasted with the beauty of the village, the nature that surrounds it, and the sensual pleasures that Nevena uncovers. More than one critic compared the movie to the languid majesty of Terence Malick’s work, in which the cinematography lingers on natural beauty, revelling in dappled sunshine and farm workers at dawn.
Stolevski takes the stylistic elements of the film further, however, tracing Navena’s evolution of language through a voice-over and using point-of-view shots to show her approaching the victims whose bodies and lives she will soon inhabit.
You Won’t Be Alone is a gore-fest (those intestines aren’t for the faint of heart) that fits squarely into the genre of poetic folk horror. It is both terrible and beautiful to look at, the kind of movie that will make your skin crawl and leave you startled by the beauty of the human experience.
Although Macedonian filmmakers have rarely been in the spotlight on the international stage, You Won’t Be Alone is further proof, alongside 2019’s Honeyland, that there is a hotbed of talent and natural beauty there that is bursting with potential.
