Goran Stolevski hauntingly explores what it means to be an outsider who yearns for human connection. That said: If you can’t handle a little disembowelment, proceed with caution.
By Laura Bradley
A strange kind of poetry lies in the bloody, scratched-up heart of Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone.
The folk horror film about a young witch, which premiered Saturday at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, unfolds in broken language and cautious gestures punctuated by staccato slaps—the kind of callousness that can make the world feel like an interminable, barren pit. But as our taloned protagonist breaks away from the desperate grasp of two overbearing, warring mothers to body swap her way through different ways of living, her jumbled words take on a certain lyricism. Contradictions run through this gorgeously gory film’s veins, its pulse beating through the repetition of two words: And yet, and yet, and yet…
We first meet our young “chosen” witch, Nevena, as an infant in 19th century Macedonia whose mother is frantically pleading with a charred witch bent on taking her away. Playing up the burden of child-rearing and offering up all the other infants in the village doesn’t work, so Nevena’s mother makes another offer to Old Maid Maria: If the witch lets her raise the child, she can take her once she becomes a teenager. That way, she reasons, the witch will not be alone in her old age.