You Won't Be Alone (2022)
Because Goran Stolevsky's astonishing debut feature, You Won't Be Alone, is about a kind of witch, and because there's plenty of blood and guts in the film, it is being marketed as a horror movie — but the expectations that the label horror places on the film do it some injustice. This is more like Terrence Malick's The Witch.
The Malick homage is overt in the You Won't Be Alone's reliance on a super-hot-miked voiceover (beautifully recorded, creating a sense of the voice coming from within ourselves while also sounding somehow alien), in its seemingly random shots of nature, and even in its soundtrack, which includes Berlioz's Requiem (as did Malick in Tree of Life) and a couple of pieces by one of the composers Malick uses most frequently, Arvo Pärt. Malick is not the only homage, though. There is a shot that basically recreates a famous one from Carl Theodor Dreyer's great witchhunt film Day of Wrath. I think it is to Stolevsky's credit that he wears some of his influences so boldly, because they become intertexts.
Consider, for instance, that both Malick and Dreyer are spiritual, even religious filmmakers, and this is a film about belief, folklore, compassion, community. It spends less time on dogma than many supernatural horror movies (which so often are a kind of pop-Christian — more often than not Catholic — propaganda), yet its concerns are undeniably those of the spirit. By so openly bringing the sensibility of filmmakers like Malick and Dreyer to material that most other people would shape more in the mold of Malignant, Stolevsky doesn't so much transcend as reconfigure what is possible with such material. (And we should remember, of course, that Dreyer himself did this with Vampyr and Day of Wrath.)
It sells Stolevsky's achievement short, though, to say You Won't Be Alone is Malickesque or Dreyeresque or whatever, because there is an earthy, dirty, deeply embodied reality to this film that is mostly absent from Malick in particular, a filmmaker whose movies can so often feel (for better or worse) ethereal. The shape of the picture is tighter and squarer than Malick has ever used, something close to Academy ratio, a rare choice these days, but one that heightens the sense of the film being both from another time and also cramped, confined, yearning for a wider view. By balancing attention to blood and flesh with motes of light and rolling fog, Stolevsky grounds the story while letting its implications soar, leaving us with something alternately visceral and intellectual. That is not a small accomplishment.
In addition to being so aesthetically interesting, You Won't Be Alone is also fascinating for its story, characters, setting, and language. According to Stolevsky, the film's spoken language is an old Macedonian dialect studied by a small number of people, and since the only other person fluent in it on the highly international set was star Sara Klimoska, the majority of what we hear is through her voiceover. The voiceover is a kind of fragmentary poetry, an idiolect, the language of someone who was kept from the world throughout her childhood. (Some of Klimoska's body language in the first half hour of the movie made me think of Kaspar Hauser and Genie Wiley; I was impressed to see in an interview that Stolevsky and Klimoska both studied Wiley as a model for the character. And I would be shocked if Stolevsky has not seen Herzog's film about Kaspar Hauser.) What we get throughout You Won't Be Alone is the narration of a creature coming slowly to recognize the world and language. That this recognition comes to us through a nearly lost dialect is especially powerful, resonant, eerie.
The setting is the mountains of Macedonia in the 19th century. This allows Stolevsky and cinematographer Matthew Chuang some sublime landscape shots — but the filmmakers are remarkably restrained, providing vistas only at particular moments of ecstacy and drama. Most of the time we are kept within the perceptual space of the main character, Nevena, learning the world alongside her.
The story has the simplicity and supernaturalism of a folktale, but it is more like history infused with folktale flavors, or history that takes account of dreams. What if, the film seems to ask, tales of witches and shapeshifters were, in fact, real? (Call it speculative history.) Some other storytellers might be tempted to render the question ambiguous, but there is nothing ambiguous about the supernatural elements of You Won't Be Alone. This is very much a story about embodiment, not possible madness or tricksy metaphysics.
It is also a story about community and companionship, about learning to be alive together and reveling in that living, even when it's a rough and rigid life, brutish and short, a life especially hard on the weak, the soft, the strange. There is a dichotomy at the heart of the film: the path of Old Maid Maria (a path of bitterness, revenge, power, and loneliness, a creature who has closed herself off to a world that hurt her) and the path of Nevena (a path of discovery, wonder, exploration, togetherness). On the surface, it's old school good vs. bad, dark vs. light — but it's a little bit more complex than that, with Old Maid Maria's values more like those of the witch in Into the Woods and Nevena's naivety leading to its own fair share of bad consequences. Still, the movie is on the side of wonder and community, of faith in something like the basic goodness of humanity. It does not feel sentimental, though, because it has no illusion that such goodness is easy, common, or longlasting. Life is tough in You Won't Be Alone, suffering abounds. But so do grace and beauty, and the glory of the film is that it shows Nevena seeking that grace and beauty as best she can, against all odds, and without expecting that those qualities are anything but fleeting and rare.
The title comes from a statement (a covenant) made by Nevena's mother to Old Maid Maria at the beginning, but soon enough it becomes the basis of Nevena's quest: she is singular, yet (unlike Maria) seeks to understand love and companionship, concepts about which she has, for a long time, more instinct than knowledge. Like an actor, she can inhabit bodies, learn from other lives, but there is a terrible cost, an eradication of the being whose body she takes. Possession is also destruction. Yet it is essential to her education. By remaining focused on something like kindness, though, she finds a way to make this possession less destructive, more beautiful.
In reading about the film's production after watching it, I was not surprised to discover that Stolensky is gay (though he quite sensibly eschews getting labeled as a queer filmmaker or somesuch). You Won't Be Alone does a nice job of attending to both female and male bodies, their shapes and desires, but more importantly it has that sensibility common to queerness, that sense of having had to learn your way into a world that first doesn't recognize you or your kind, then may fear or be repulsed by you when it does recognize you. The film quite powerfully captures the sense of learning the ways of passing, of getting by, of being (or failing to be) part of the group. There are some extraordinary scenes with Noomi Rapace as Nevena learning how and when to laugh and cry, scenes that made me catch my breath because I knew exactly that feeling, the practice required to seem more recognizably human.
IfYou Won't Be Alone is horror it is only so in the sense that We're All Going to the World's Fair is horror. The perils of the label for both films are that it sets up an expectation the movies not only don't meet but aren't in the same universe as, expectations of a certain kind of moodiness and plot-based tension and shocks and gross-outs. I don't want to put a label on films and filmmakers deliberately (and valiantly!) working to undo taxonomies and to complicate ideas of identity, but if these films must be called horror then they must also be called queer horror, in every sense of queer. That's a label I could, myself, live with — in fact, my friend Craig Gidney recently called me a "horrorqueer author" and I will happily adopt it!
That there is always something of horror within the queer (if not queer within the horror) gets at a tendency proving particularly productive for this era of storytelling, a tendency that is not about jump scares or superficial frights. Rather, it is a tendency in stories that try perhaps to inhabit (or reclaim?) the monstrous, the dangerous, the abject while also thinking about how creatures (sometimes human, sometimes not) seek to exist together in a world of suffering. These are not stories of salvation, nor do their meditations on loneliness and community end with community as triumph, loneliness vanquished, everybody fulfilled and joyous and riding off into the sunset together. They are more honest than that, more jaded, more jagged.
"It’s a burning, breaking thing, this world," Nevena says repeatedly in You Won't Be Alone. Every queer person knows this at the core of their being — a being that is also always-already burning and breaking. "And yet..." we keep saying. And yet.
