Post by Dracula on Apr 17, 2022 21:09:38 GMT -5
You Won’t Be Alone(4/12/2022)
I think we might all be a little spoiled when it comes to horror movies. Right now there’s a Macedonian language movie about witchcraft rooted in Blakens folklore and shot in the Academy ratio and using a lyrical style playing at hundreds of multiplexes across the country and all anyone can say is “meh, been there, done that.” That’s not to say I’m immune from this jadedness either because I also watched Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone and also found myself watching what is by most standards an incredible unique piece of work and still thinking it was a bit of a trend hopper. The film is set in a 19th Century Macedonian village and focuses on a girl who is claimed by a witch named Old Maid Maria as an infant. Her birth mother strikes a deal to keep her until she’s sixteen, at the cost of the girl’s speech and the birth mother opts to raise her in a cave away from the rest of humanity. There was no escaping this deal the deal however and the witch does come to claim the girl at sixteen, killing the birth mother, and tries to raise the girl as her own.
The film’s outdoor trappings and earthy witchcraft themes certainly suggest this is trying to be an “elevated horror” movie (for lack of a better term) but the thing is, this isn’t really a horror film at all despite the subject matter and occasional graphic violence. The movie doesn’t really engage in suspense at all and isn’t really trying to “scare” the audience at any time. Instead the movie is kind of trying to answer the question “what if Terrence Malick tried to make a movie about Balkens witchcraft… and also wasn’t as talented of a filmmaker.” The film has a similar technique of focusing on nature and occasional odd angles of the day to day moments of village life as the witch goes about her thing with a lot of the storytelling done through voiceover reflecting the protagonists’ thoughts. That voiceover is a bit odd because the protagonist, having been raised in a platonic cave and not being able to actually speak hasn’t fully grasped speech and her internal monologue has something of a caveman quality to it, which is maybe a layer of strangeness the movie didn’t need. Otherwise the movie does get into a bit of a groove as it goes and becomes a story about someone literally trying on different lives over the course of years and coming to learn what humanity is about, which is certainly interesting in theory but I’m not sure it ever quite connects and the overall film never quite comes together in my opinion, but still, the movie has too much going for it to be ignored. It is worth a look even if it never quite jived with me.
*** out of Five
I think we might all be a little spoiled when it comes to horror movies. Right now there’s a Macedonian language movie about witchcraft rooted in Blakens folklore and shot in the Academy ratio and using a lyrical style playing at hundreds of multiplexes across the country and all anyone can say is “meh, been there, done that.” That’s not to say I’m immune from this jadedness either because I also watched Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone and also found myself watching what is by most standards an incredible unique piece of work and still thinking it was a bit of a trend hopper. The film is set in a 19th Century Macedonian village and focuses on a girl who is claimed by a witch named Old Maid Maria as an infant. Her birth mother strikes a deal to keep her until she’s sixteen, at the cost of the girl’s speech and the birth mother opts to raise her in a cave away from the rest of humanity. There was no escaping this deal the deal however and the witch does come to claim the girl at sixteen, killing the birth mother, and tries to raise the girl as her own.
The film’s outdoor trappings and earthy witchcraft themes certainly suggest this is trying to be an “elevated horror” movie (for lack of a better term) but the thing is, this isn’t really a horror film at all despite the subject matter and occasional graphic violence. The movie doesn’t really engage in suspense at all and isn’t really trying to “scare” the audience at any time. Instead the movie is kind of trying to answer the question “what if Terrence Malick tried to make a movie about Balkens witchcraft… and also wasn’t as talented of a filmmaker.” The film has a similar technique of focusing on nature and occasional odd angles of the day to day moments of village life as the witch goes about her thing with a lot of the storytelling done through voiceover reflecting the protagonists’ thoughts. That voiceover is a bit odd because the protagonist, having been raised in a platonic cave and not being able to actually speak hasn’t fully grasped speech and her internal monologue has something of a caveman quality to it, which is maybe a layer of strangeness the movie didn’t need. Otherwise the movie does get into a bit of a groove as it goes and becomes a story about someone literally trying on different lives over the course of years and coming to learn what humanity is about, which is certainly interesting in theory but I’m not sure it ever quite connects and the overall film never quite comes together in my opinion, but still, the movie has too much going for it to be ignored. It is worth a look even if it never quite jived with me.
*** out of Five
