Mark Reviews Movies: YOU WON'T BE ALONE

You Won't Be Alone, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 31, 2022

You Won't Be Alone tells the story of a young witch, marked as a baby and raised as a teenager by an older witch, on a decades-spanning journey to understand herself and discover some purpose in her life. This journey doesn't go very far, since most of the story takes place among a small region of farmland somewhere in Macedonia during the 19th century, although one would have to be keen on Balkan languages, as well as the history of clothing and tools, to place this story in a specific region and era.

Writer/director Goran Stolevski, making his feature debut, doesn't concern himself with such specifics—or many specifics, for that matter. This film is mostly about its pervasive atmosphere and assorted feelings, sitting within sight but just out of reach beneath its surface. That's not a criticism. It's mainly a description of how this tale operates.

Stolevski's narrative takes the perspective of that young witch, who has never known a thing about a normal life or even humanity. We first meet this character as a baby, and within a relative flash, she is a young woman, removed from any form of civilization. She cannot speak, except by way of the thoughts in her mind, and even if she could, the words would be limited and the phrases would be broken.

She does not know what it means to be and live as a human. Based on what life has thrown her way, it seems unlikely she ever will, but throughout this enigmatic tale of quiet observation and constant transformation, something drives the witch toward humanity.

All of this is founded in myth and magic, but the core of the story remains grounded in that sense of longing for meaning, purpose, and belonging. It's only ostensibly about witches, because the powers and longevity of such figures allow Stolevski to open his protagonist to the possibilities of an assortment of people, experiences, and lifetimes. That the seemingly endless possibilities available to the witch start to feel too limited for her goal is, well, how we all feel in some way.

As a baby, our protagonist is the only child of a woman (played by Kamka Tocinovki) who works on a farm and lives in a small hut. The mother is visited one day by a witch—a "wolf-eateress," according to the local folklore—of some infamous legend in the area. She's Old Maiden Maria (Anamaria Marinca), who has come to the hut to feed on the blood of a newborn. The mother offers a deal: If the witch spares the child now, the woman will give her daughter to Maria, to be her daughter, when the child turns 16.

Maria accepts the deal and cuts the baby's tongue with her long, black, and talon-like fingernails, but the mother brings her baby to a sacred cave, hoping to evade the bargain. Sixteen years later, Nevena (Sara Klimoska) has only known the cave and the occasional visit from her mother for food. Maria, taking the form of a hawk, arrives, kills the mother, and leads Nevena into the forest to teach her the ways of witchcraft.

One of the tricks is how to transform into an animal or person, by inserting the flesh of the victim into the witch's own body, via a gaping hole on the spot anointed by the mother witch's claws and spit. A witch can turn another witch only once in her life, so when Nevena decides to leave Maria for a life among the farmers, the elder witch believes her gift was given in vain. Maria keeps an eye on her adopted daughter and warns Nevena of surely inevitable betrayal by humanity (We later learn her story—as short, uneventful, and tragic as her time as a human was).

In terms of the conflict within some semblance of a plot, this is all Stolevski provides. Most of this story revolves around Nevena, using her transformational magic to become an assortment of people on the farms, looking for some way to fit in among others and live a normal life. The first is a new mother named Bosilka (Noomi Rapace), whom Nevena accidentally kills when the woman comes to see who is looking over her crying baby. In taking Bosilka's form, the witch learns of the hardships women face in this society, the sense of community they build together when the men are absent, and the harassment, abuse, and assault inflicted upon them by those men.

There are others—including a handsome farmhand named Boris (Carloto Cotta), who attempts to rape Nevena in the woods but in whose form the witch learns of the potential for pleasure in sex, and a young child. The girls dies in an accident, allowing Nevena to finally experience childhood, before growing into Biliana (Alice Englert) and falling in love with the sensitive Yovan (Félix Maritaud). Through her narration, Nevena describes her experiences and ponders what they mean in terms of some sense of purpose, as the language she uses becomes richer—employing more words, adopting a more metaphorical approach, tapping into larger ideas beyond herself. It's a tale of transformation that essentially becomes one of personal and philosophical evolution.

For his part, Stolevski is patient in letting these vignettes of human experience unfold with a sense of in-the-moment intimacy and a broader feeling of time as an ever-fleeting thing (Generations come and go on the land as vital and then forgotten parts of it). You Won't Be Alone maintains a hauntingly mysterious and mournful tone for its aching tale of figuring out the joy, pain, and messiness of being human.

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