Robert Eggers meets Terrence Malick in You Won’t Be Alone, a bloody—and bloody good—vampire tale that squeezes quite a few new twists out of fundamentally familiar material. Rapturously beautiful and sufficiently different from its bloodsucking brethren to engage fresh interest in aspects of the undead, Australian director Goran Stolevski’s very confident debut feature goes places its generic brethren never thought of visiting. The Sundance 2022 entry to the World Dramatic Competition section will serve its purpose by putting the creator on the map and providing a variety of new twists to familiar material. Focus Features has a commercial release scheduled for April 1.
Stolevski is the author. Are You Interested in Her Beauty?This short film won the 2018 Sundance best documentary prize. It goes beyond the usual boundaries of blood-sucker yarns and brings historical, ethnic and culture considerations to a table that is filled with both familiar and exotic goodies. At first it’s not at all clear where the film is going with its unappetizing basic ingredients of baby-snatching, blood-sucking and 19th century rural miserablism. Once it becomes apparent that the filmmaker is thinking beyond gore and weirdness, however, a different kind of vampire story emerges.
The writer-director was born in Macedonia and that’s where he sets this wild tale of a young peasant girl who is kidnapped, takes over the body of a woman she accidentally kills and is thus transformed into a witch by some manner of ancient spirit. It is hard to imagine a more remote mountainous location. Nor are the people likely to abandon the basic rural lifestyles they have cultivated for hundreds of years. For a while, one is pressed to wonder why we’re being encouraged to take an interest in these ornery and backward characters, so disconnected are they from temporal concerns.
It is possible that the first half-hour of the movie might be too long for genre viewers. Native-speakers may also have trouble understanding the dialogue, which is supposedly strictly 19th-century. Even this small detail is in tune to the story. “you’ve never seen this before”One aspect of the bitterly fought tale is its esoteric roots, which are deeply rooted in the little-changed country. A matriarchal society, whose inhabitants are deeply religious and would make hillbillies appear like fashion icons, is an apparent matriarchal society.
A leading character’s first sign she is becoming a different type of being is her growing long and dark fingernails. This is something she discretely hides. One’s patience is tested for some time, as the “witch-mama”Surreptitiously, she staggers about as she tries adapt to her new talents and appetites. “woman-madness,”One peasant describes it as such. For a good while, it’s not at all clear that You Won’t Be Aloneis not going to any other Zombieland, where the leading lady will always be looking for new victims to fuel her fires.
The film eventually finds a new direction. It is somewhere in between a folk tale and an investigation that delve deeper into the darker sides of human nature. When the leading lady meets a splendidly athletic young man and eventually, against any instinct she’s previously felt, decides to let nature take its course with him, the result is some brutal raw drama that casts an intriguingly ambiguous light on a curse and malign tradition (which is where Eggers comes in) that proves difficult to extinguish entirely.
It’s a horror story rooted both in ethnic tradition and historical fact. Stolevski attacks it boldly, expanding normally quite limited zombie and witchcraft clichés into something related to a real place with a specific cultural background. The story is made more female-centric when it involves the introduction of a child to this world. This decision was further supported by the numerous actresses who play the central role. This risky choice paid off magnificently.
The final touch is a camera style that Malick and other cinematographers have created over the years. Matthew Chuang’s camera is constantly in motion, floating, darting, swirling, dashing inward and out, up and down, moving with the actors and sweeping everything along in a whirlwind of activity and almost always beautiful synch with where the actors are and where they’re headed next. The film almost feels choreographed.