You Won't Be Alone (2022)

In my quest to watch anything with Noomi Rapace in it, I came across this film and ended up rather enjoying it. However, it's a bit bizarre! If you thought Lamb (her film from 2021) was a bit odd, this surpasses it as probably the strangest film I've seen in the last couple of years! But hang on in there.

Putting Noomi's involvement into perspective, she's only actually in for about 15 minutes as she plays the part of one of the people whose bodies our central character jumps into, driven by a ruthless witch in 19th century Macedonia! And there I paint a sharp picture of the story one is getting into here! It's a story of witches and simple folk living in fear of such things in a village in the countryside, working together to feed themselves from the land, avoiding the plague and just surviving.

Apart from Noomi Rapace (Stockholm, Lamb, The Secrets We Keep) I haven't seen much of the other actors - Alice Englert (Beautiful Creatures) and Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Europa Report, Fury) being the two main leads. Everyone seems to be very engaged with what is going on though and performing very well. Director/writer Goran Stolevski comes from Macedonia, though seems to have lived most of his life in Australia. He holds things together pretty well and makes the most of things visually with some very nice leadership in terms of continuity, images, shooting, lighting and set.

The film is a horror really, but it's more shocking for the audience in terms of gore and the characters with supernatural powers making a bloody mess of much of what they come in contact with. Adult humans, animals, babies - nobody gets a pass and it is a little gruesome at times. There's also some nudity and sexual scenes thrown in just in case the aforementioned wasn't quite enough to get an X-rating!

Anyway, we join the story with a severely deformed-by-fire witch hustling in on a lady (minding her own business) who has just had a child. The witch tries to snatch it but mother swiftly takes action to prevent this - at least until the child is 16. In order to keep the witch's wrinkled hands off it, she puts her in a cavern and leaves her there, attending to her needs every few days bringing her supplies etc. For 16 years she sees nobody and has no socialisation of any sort. Mother is hoping the witch has forgotten, when her child is 16, or that she doesn't know where she hid her. But of course witches know everything and she rocks up for her reward as agreed.

The witch then oversees the life of the girl (Biliana, Alice Englert) but they soon fall out as Biliana wants a normal life. She ain't going to get it though and via various gruesome and barbaric acts, she flits between various living creatures (one being Bosilka, Noomi Rapace) when they're either dead anyway or by killing them first! She then 'transforms' into their being (by removing their innards and putting them into herself) and tries to take over living their lives for them - usually with disastrous results as she has no idea how to behave socially or any other way, having been stuck in a cave all her life!

I think you get the idea. It's all fairly involved and you need to watch closely to keep up with what's going on, how things develop and to make sense of the outcome. I think I did - just about! Biliana has to learn things the hard way and through her adventures and misery, she does so. We get a snapshot of their world, too, full of male dominance leading to violence towards women generally, cultural superstition, the importance of family bonds, relationships and love. It feels very much like a fairy tale often, except the fairy seems missing and is replaced with witches! Think Merlin. Kind of. Or perhaps Rumpelstiltskin!

Finally, Biliana is trying hard to break away from the burned old witch and as we head towards the climax, showdown, a High Noon in the making, we find out if Biliana's good intentions and trapped existence conquers the evil of the old witch! Yes, it's that old good vs evil battle again! I'm sure that I've probably missed out on a lot of the metaphors and parallels which I should have picked up, so maybe I'll watch it again. It's subtitled/dubbed but actually there's not a huge amount of dialogue overall and I thought it was a very interesting film, a little slow in parts, but well worth seeking out and getting stuck into!