A small town in 19th-century Macedonia has a legend of a witch, Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), who wanders throughout the wooded countryside searching for children to turn into witches like herself.  Nevena (Sara Klimoska) is promised as an infant by her mother to Maria, and on the girl’s 16th birthday, Maria appears to the girl as an eagle before performing the transformative spell.  Unlike Maria, whose past has taught her to hate humans, Nevena is fascinated by life and uses her powers to experience it to the fullest by taking the form of various people throughout the town and learning about the range of emotions that color a lifetime. 

Premiering at Sundance where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema – Drama category, You Won’t Be Alone is a rumination on the human experience, dressed as a horror film, from writer/director Goran Stolevski and released by Focus Features.  To look at the film strictly through the lens of horror, audiences will find themselves disappointed and/or frustrated at the slowly unfolding and meditative nature of the piece that borrows key elements from folk horror but repurposes them to tell a story about the fullness and beauty of love and loss.  Paced and structured not unlike a Terence Malick film, Matthew Chuang’s cinematography and Luca Cappelli’s editing piece together the sparse script to create a full and sprawling vision across the 108-minute runtime.   

The magic in You Won’t Be Alone takes two main forms; a shape-shifting ritual that involves the witches taking entrails from their kill and inserting them into a cavity in their chest which allows them to take the form of that person or animal, and a transformative spell which can only be performed once by a witch who uses her black talons and slashes open the chest cavity on a mortal human before spitting cursed blood into the wound.  These spells are shown to us by Maria as she teaches them to Nevena, wordlessly, and it adds to the ancient and primal feel of the entire film and forges a deeper connection between audience and character than it would have had it been dictated or otherwise explained. 

As her voice was taken from her by Maria as an infant, much of the knowledge of the film is delivered through a stream of conscious voiceover from Nevena.  For audiences who are not on board with the bewitching concept of You Won’t Be Alone, this approach is unlikely to warm them to the narrative, but for those who are willing to give themselves over to the poetry of the language coupled with the wooded vistas and Mark Bradshaw’s score, they will find the film a rewarding experience.  That is not to say that the film is aimless, there is a clear structure and arc which Nevena follows as she cycles through various people in the town while learning about life.  It is a bit of a fairy tale contrivance, her mother had hidden her away for those sixteen years in a cave, and she has no understanding of community, but again, for those who give themselves over to the film and view it in good faith, they will find it a very beautiful look at the range of human emotion which grows and transforms throughout the experience of life. 

The story itself is a painful and poignant one, yet accented with hope. Whereas Maria has become hardened with hate, Nevena longs to find a connection to the world around her; to find belonging in a community. Even though her story starts off traumatic – an accidental murder causing Nevena to take the form of her victim, and then enduring an assault from the woman’s husband before fleeing – but still Nevena seeks a connection to the world around her. She takes on many additional forms throughout the arc; a dog, a hunky fieldhand, and finally a little girl, Biliana (Alice Englert), who had fallen to her death. In an arguably selfless act, Nevena takes the form of this little girl so as to give her life and also spare her mother the pain of loss, and it opens You Won’t be Alone to an incredibly cathartic final act.  As a young girl, she hears the legend of Old Maid Maria and also meets a young boy, Yovan (Félix Maritaud), who is mute like her. The two form a friendship, and as they grow up together it becomes a relationship and eventually, a marriage. Maria, never far from town and never cooling her hatred, takes the form of a boar and kills the newly-wed Yovan on a hunting trip, and Nevena, fearing for their newborn child’s life, goes into hiding, but Maria finds a way into the home and attacks the infant. Nevena sacrifices her goat so that she can use the blood to transform her child into a witch, thus saving its life, and then taking the form of the goat, she attacks Maria, killing her. 

You Won’t Be Alone is a film about growth, recovery, and emergence. Strength and resiliency lie at the heart of the story, though it reveals itself slowly, long after the film has ended, even, and it has time to ferment and evolve in the minds and memories of the audience. Its core message that life is worth living is broad enough to apply to all people, though its construction is understandably frustrating for some. Stolevski takes this story about a Macedonian witch and creates a fable that can lend hope to those who have endured their own traumas – be it of the mind, the body, or the spirit – and show that there is still love, peace, and understanding in this sometimes cruel world, if only we choose to foster those values in our own actions. We reap what we sow and kindness begets kindness, though Stolevski wisely shows that accepting kindness – towards oneself and towards others – can sometimes take a lifetime to achieve, but nevertheless, it is a goal worth working towards.