I Would Like to See It: You Won't Be Alone

As far as actively cribbing from contemporary films goes, you could do worse than to pick and choose elements of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life to paste into your story about a body-snatching witch child experiencing various facets of human life after spending her childhood shut up in a cave. Close-ups of hands and faces. Babies staring at the world in wonder. ‘Ma Vlast’ playing over scenes of children running through the natural world with arms thrown wide and roughspun clothes flying around them. Goran Stolevski is no Malick. He lacks his inspiration’s attentiveness to depth of field, to makeup and prosthetics, to divinity as something both within and beyond daily life. His movie is hobbled more than once by technical shortfalls — the witch or “wolf-eatress” Maria’s (Anamaria Marinca) burn prosthetics are a particular stumbling block — and suffers from its self-imposed comparisons to Malick’s intimate epic, but within its limited scope it offers genuine tenderness and terror, awe and isolation.

The Macedonian hills and forests take on a primordial feel under Stolevski’s direction, and the film’s work with shadow is soothing and effortlessly natural. If the script is sometimes underwritten, the staging a bit lifeless — especially in the film’s earliest segments concerning protagonist Nevena’s (Sara Klimoska as an adult, Leontina Bainović as a child, and various others in her other incarnations, most notably Noomi Rapace) seclusion in a remote cave, the naturalistic complexity of its scenes of village life more than make up for it. We watch Nevena try on and discard many roles in life, first sampling adulthood as both man and woman before returning herself to the childhood she never experienced in a deeply bittersweet sequence, all while she slowly learns how to exist as part of the arbitrary, difficult, and sometimes frightening machine that is human community. Stolevski’s film is rich with metaphorical dissections of gender and family, archetype and experience.

For all that her makeup is less than effective, Marinca is a powerful presence as Maria the wolf-eatress, a sour and sardonic memento mori hovering at the margins of Nevena’s life. It swiftly becomes apparent as Nevena attempts to integrate herself into human society that Maria is as much fearful as fearsome, hopelessly damaged and embittered by the nightmarish circumstances which led to her own transformation and threatened by the idea that someone else could overcome their hardships and go on to lead a full life. Again and again she attacks Nevena’s life, tearing at its fabric in an effort to drag her creation back into the woods where they can be alone together, playing at wildness in the shadow of their incestuous fear of the world that abused and rejected them both. The film sketches a moving portrait of holding one’s self hostage to one’s own past, and of insisting that others join in that act of willful delusion. How much power do old wounds really have, and how much is given by refusal to let them close?