ABCs of Horror 3: “Y” Is for You Won’t Be Alone (2022)

ABCs of Horror 3: “Y” Is for You Won’t Be Alone (2022)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

There’s a moment of incredibly simple, elemental, raw power and poignancy in the opening minutes of director Goran Stolevski’s 2022 dark fantasy horror drama You Won’t Be Alone. A harried mother in rural, 19th century Macedonia is cursing out the local children getting in her way, clearly wishing for a reprieve from caring for her caterwauling infant daughter, when the hairs on the back of her neck suddenly stand up. Slowly turning around, she finds a new figure has suddenly appeared in her home, a horrifically scarred and burned woman looming above the crib of the crying baby. Her bitterness instantly forgotten, the mother drops to her knees. She’s never seen this woman in her home before, but she knows exactly what she’s facing–the witch or “wolf-eateress” known through local legend as Old Maria (Anamaria Marinca). It’s immediately clear that what she says and does next will define the life (or death) of her daughter.

And so, the mother begins to bargain with the inhuman witch, pleading that she spare her daughter, begging her to not steal the defenseless whelp from the cradle for a meal of blood. Instead, she asks for the chance to raise her daughter to maturity, and that she’ll turn her over to Old Maria to do as she will when she reaches her 16th birthday. It’s a type of bargaining with the infernal powers that feels universal to the viewer regardless of their origin–an ancestral tale that feels pulled from our collective unconscious. It’s also an extremely tense scene to be occurring just moments into the film, crackling with potential energy in the unspoken threat to the lives of both the mother and child. Compare it, perhaps, to the power of the opening sequence in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, as it becomes clear that someone is going to have to pay a price of blood on this ominous day. The Mother has perhaps lived her entire life here in the harsh, agrarian countryside without ever having to confront this sort of elemental power of evil, but TODAY, there’s no avoiding it. It’s why we tell our folk tales; to prepare us for moments such as these.

In the end, the witch accepts the offer, although of course she extracts a toll in doing so, forever robbing the baby of its voice before she departs. The Mother, meanwhile, dedicates the next 16 years to the fervent, fevered hope that she can somehow get away without paying the price that was agreed upon, raising her daughter in total isolation in a sacred cave, far from the influence of any other individual, in the hope that she might somehow protect her. That’s how we properly meet our protagonist Nevena (Sara Klimoska), an emotionally and socially stunted young woman who has experienced her entire life both voiceless and robbed of any knowledge of the outside world. When Old Maria reappears and kills her mother, beckoning for Nevena to follow her to the surface, we are seeing her take her first shaky steps into an alien world, lacking even the language to describe in her own mental narrative what exactly is happening to her. She may be physically 16, but in most respects she’s still the wailing (now silent) baby in that crib. You Won’t Be Alone weaves layers of horror and disorientation into this experience, not missing the sheer profundity of the shock inherent to first coming out into the light, being completely overwhelmed by the enormity of the sky and the countryside. Nevena is like a goldfish that has been scooped out of a bowl and dropped into the breathtakingly beautiful and terrifying ocean. What choice does she have but to cling to Maria, the only other “human” figure she’s ever seen?

Thus begins Nevena’s education in the ways of the world, instruction flowing both from the witch–who tells her to kill without remorse and serve her own purposes–and the natural world, which dazzles Nevena with its wonders. Old Maria makes Nevena a witch as well, seemingly yearning for some form of companionship, although she would never admit as much, viewing the entire human world–its petty squabbles and betrayals–with bitter disdain. Better to live with the freedom to come, go and dispassionately kill as you will, rather than subject yourself to the depravity of human cruelty and servitude. But Nevena can’t help but shrug off these fatalistic lessons–after all, she’s experienced none of it for herself. Her seclusion has implanted a deep longing for connection in her, something that You Won’t Be Alone’s use of fractured inner monologue accurately struggles to convey, as Nevena’s mind is anything but complete. It is inevitable she’ll eventually be cast out by the spurned Old Maria, who laments that she used her singular ability to create another witch in her life on an unworthy protege and daughter figure. In doing so, she echoes the words of Nevena’s actual mother without even knowing it.

You Won’t Be Alone thus becomes the story of the naive young witch’s abortive, often tragic attempts to integrate into the human society around her, to experience the companionship and community that she was denied during the long years of wasting away in the cave. After accidentally killing a peasant, Nevena learns that she has the ability to take on the appearance–and thus the life–of any creature she has killed, which allows her to step into the role of an adult woman in the nearby village, albeit with capacities barely beyond those of a small child. It’s a painful introduction to society, to put it mildly–the woman whose body she now occupies is a new mother who we see give birth in the fields while standing and clutching a fence post, howling in agony, before then waddling back to tend to the corn moments after undergoing one of the most traumatic and painful experiences any woman can endure. There’s no suggestion that this woman might require any rest or be owed some form of recuperation after carrying out her reproductive duties. No commiseration is proffered in that moment, even from the village’s other women. They operate under the watchful eyes of the men, and even Nevena can understand the dynamic before long: In this guise, you exist to be seen, but not heard.

But of course as a witch, Nevena has options, and she utilizes them. She clambers from body to body, experiencing life as a strapping young man and then eventually as a small village child once again, finally embraced by a supportive community for the first time in her life. But never can she truly lay down her native identity, her “witch me,” as Old Maria occasionally reappears to needle and dissuade her. She will forever be an Other, forever be one slip-up away from being discovered and put to death by a society that fears a woman-shaped creature ever inheriting too much power or freedom. Old Maria contends that any moments of happiness here will be fleeting and illusory, only making the heartbreak that much deeper when her true self next emerges. But is that just what Maria needs to tell herself, in order to justify her own lifetime–many lifetimes–as a bitter outsider who has seemingly long since forgotten the very human instincts that first led to her own transformation? This clash of fatalism and youthful exuberance, tempered by the hammer blows of reality, make up the heart of the film’s philosophical debate.

There is little doubt that You Won’t Be Alone will read as entirely too pretentious or navel-gazing for a significant subset of the horror-loving population, although at the same time it’s really not lacking for genuinely horrific imagery, blood and guts. The presence of supernatural witches would hardly be necessary for making an arduous film, with these characters in this place, where the struggle of daily agrarian life is already a ceaseless endurance run beset by cycles of random violence and self-perpetuating ignorance. Add to that the film’s pastoral beauty, its sumptuous photography of animal forms and the fragility of life, its exotic but somehow familiar mythology and spirituality, and it becomes every bit as bewitching to the senses as the magic and the gristle we see on screen. Like a conceptual meeting between Robert Eggers and Terrence Malick, this is less “every frame a painting,” and more “every frame a portent.”

For fans of foundational folk horror texts with solid attention spans, You Won’t Be Alone casts a spell from which it is impossible to emerge.


Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

 
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