You Won’t Be Alone: Living in Witchery

In an isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia, a young girl is kidnapped and then transformed into a witch by an ancient spirit.

Review:

I love how the witch film You Won’t Be Alone moves lyrically, subconsciously between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale.

Alone pares down its visuals to a bare lyrical essence, even down to archetype. Its dialogue exists between learning the words, stumbling over them, achieving proficiency by discovering the beauty and horror, the magical and existential all around in this harsh Macedonian environment, and creating a poetry that lifts it up beyond its barren means.

You Won’t Be Alone doesn’t just draw on Macedonian folklore, it lives it, devours it, circles around revisiting and reinventing it. Its all magic and creation, recreation.

Alone is totally enchanted with its witchery, the creation of its archetypes and mythology. Its cursed and always trying to run away from that curse, and when that fails, trying to unspell it.

Like a witch, Alone constantly shape-shifts trying to understand this cursed existential life by living in its essence. It stumbles around , pulling and pushing hearts from chests until all life is absorbed into its unsettling final vision. Its witchery subsumes every frame

Alone’s horror and power is found in the careful, subtle and total commitment of its cast, its images and its vision. The debut director, Goran Stolevski confidently knows how to create this world. He knows how to show the horror of a human nature that cannot love because it doesn’t know how to nurture.