You Won't Be Alone (2022)
There's a moment early in You Won't Be Alone where the landscape itself feels like a character, brooding and enormous and indifferent to the tiny, violent lives being lived across it. That image lodged in my head. It's the kind of film that gets under your skin through sheer visual force, even when the story underneath isn't quite holding its own weight.
Written and directed by Goran Stolevski, this is a folk-horror set in 19th-century Macedonia, following a young girl transformed by a shapeshifting witch into something that wanders between bodies and identities across a lifetime. The premise is genuinely fresh. Rather than treating the witch figure as pure menace, Stolevski uses the curse as a way of exploring what it means to inhabit a body, to feel hunger and grief and desire, to be human at all. It's more philosophy than horror, and there are stretches where that pays off beautifully.
The cinematography is extraordinary. Sweeping, painterly, with a use of natural light that makes even the grimmest scenes feel somehow sacred. The period detail is meticulous without being showy. If you're someone who responds to a film that treats its landscapes as emotional language, this will absolutely do it for you. I was genuinely arrested by it, frame after frame.
But here's where my feelings get complicated. The practical effects for the witch herself are, to put it generously, a mixed bag. The body horror works often enough, but there are moments, particularly around the eye work, where the transformation feels more conceptual than physical. You're aware you're watching something unconvincing, and in a film that depends so heavily on immersion, that's a problem. It nudges you out of the spell at exactly the wrong moments.
The comparison to Robert Eggers' The VVitch is pretty much inevitable, and I don't think You Won't Be Alone comes out of it especially well. Both films trust atmosphere over plot, both are rooted in a specific rural landscape and a specific kind of female experience pushed to its limits, and both take folklore seriously as a framework for terror. But The VVitch has a psychological claustrophobia, a coiling dread that keeps tightening right to the end. You Won't Be Alone meanders. The episodic structure feels intentional, fable-like, and for a while it works. Then the second half loses momentum, and the finale, while thematically consistent with everything that's come before, fizzles rather than lands. I found myself wanting something to crack open, some release or devastation, and it never quite came.
That said, I want to be fair to what Stolevski is actually doing here. He's not trying to make a horror film in the conventional sense. He's writing something closer to a meditation on consciousness and identity, using the witch's curse as a structuring device rather than a source of suspense. That's an admirable swing for a debut. And on that level, the film delivers something genuinely original. I was thinking about it for days after, even if I was occasionally frustrated watching it.
I was reminded a little of Hive, another film from the same rough period rooted in a specific rural culture and a woman's experience of violence and survival. That one lands harder emotionally, I think, partly because it keeps its focus tighter. You Won't Be Alone has grander ambitions, but ambition without discipline will only carry you so far.
Three stars. Worth your time for the artistry and the originality, and Stolevski is clearly a director to watch. But go in knowing it's a film that trusts mood over momentum, and if you need a story to hold onto, you might find yourself drifting. I did. Still, those landscapes. Genuinely stunning.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-05-31
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