‘You Won’t Be Alone’ Film Review: Ambitious Horror Tale Collapses into Distracting Excess
th century Macedonia, writer-director Goran Stolevski’s debut feature presents a disorienting narrative about Nevena (mostly played by Noomi Rapace), a shape-shifting teenage witch who’s kidnapped and then haunted by the malicious “wolf-eateress” conjurer Maria (Anamaria Marinca, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”).The movie’s heavy-handed and often distracting impressionistic style — lots of too-tight extreme close-ups, wobbly hand-held camerawork, whispery stream-of-conscious voiceover narration, and over-edited montages — will understandably frustrate some viewers and draw comparisons to recent dramas directed by Terrence Malick (“Knight of Cups,” “The Tree of Life”) as well as Robert Eggers’ “elevated horror” movies “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.” Stolevski’s pretentious and mindlessly alienating style also smothers his ensemble cast’s performances and his crew’s diligent contributions, especially work by production designer Bethany Ryan, costume designer Sladjana Perić-Santrač, sound designer Emma Bortignon, and their respective teams.Most of “You Won’t Be Alone” concerns Nevena (first played by Petra Ćirić, then Sara Klimoska) and her vain attempts at understanding basic human experiences after Yelena’s biological mother Yoana (Kamka Tocinovski) forces her to spend her childhood hiding from the predatory Maria. Yelena and the others usually explain their motives through elliptical, fragmented dialogue and voiceover narration, so it’s often hard to tell why they do what they do unless it’s heavily implied through distracting close-ups and babbling commentary.Basically, Nevena’s story begins after Maria abducts and adopts her.