Everything means something else

The use of parable to establish customs and convey larger meaning has been around since the dawn of civilization. Telling someone "Things aren't always as they seem" generally has less impact than if you tell them the story of the blind men and the elephant. My guess is that that's where writer/director Goran Stolevski began with You Won't Be Alone. Having dual Australian and Macedonian heritage, he decided to explore some of the roots of the latter by telling a story about witches, societal roles, sex, personal identity, questioning social mores, and half a dozen other things in 19th-century Macedonia, which was still under the rule of the Ottomans, which is also pointed out several times and is often important in understanding modern Balkan societies. Does that sound like a lot to pack in to one story? Because it is and that may be the film's overarching flaw that detracts from something which may have been better delivered with the extraneous parts cut away. Or clawed away, as the case may be, because that happens quite a bit in this film, too.

When we saw the trailer, it was presented as a horror film, which it ostensibly still is. I went in expecting something spooky and largely centered around the isolation that comes with being an apex predator that human society- your prey -will work pretty hard to, well, isolate and destroy. What we got instead sprawled in so many different directions that any sense of the horrific was subsumed by all the other messages being delivered. This is what the term "overwritten" often refers to and this film was a prime example of it. We begin with Nevena, as a baby, being marked by Old Maid Maria; the seeming progenitor of the scourge of witchery. In response, her mother imprisons Nevena in a cave, occasionally bringing food and some grooming, so that Maria won't be able to find her and steal her away when she comes of age. The fact that imprisoning her daughter in a cave without human contact is effectively stealing her away better than Maria might have apparently doesn't occur to mom. But that's one of those messages about the need for community in the human condition. The problem here is that that same community would tear the witchling Nevena "to shreds" as her mother warns. These aphorismal contrasts continue throughout the story; the need for men to provide the literal seed leading to the joy of children, despite their abusive behavior; the need for the weaker members of society to depend on the assistance of that community, despite being scorned or mocked for their weakness; the question of identity and the individual within that larger grouping and how difficult it is to see things from someone else's perspective; and so on.

The largest theme is that which centers around the mistreatment of women, not only in the chauvinistic cultures of the 19th-century Balkans, but in human society in general. It's pointed out that Old Maid Maria becomes bitter and vengeful, and continues to carry out that bitterness against Nevena who refuses to share it, essentially because she didn't get married and serve in the role that women are nominally assigned. Of course, that whole perspective is a form of misogyny. Maria is pointedly the villain, not only towards normal humans, but also Nevena, who is so desperate to be like them that she begins wearing their skins not to prey upon them, but to assimilate. But Maria is the villain because she essentially shrugged off that role that society tried to dictate to her. She preys on those who wanted to treat her as a resource, rather than a human, and tried to burn her alive. It's kind of like suggesting that  revolution is something we should aspire to, but the person who started said revolution is a criminal who shouldn't be tolerated. It ends up becoming something of a mixed message, likely because of the overload of themes that Stolevski attempted to pack in. We don't really spend much time getting to know anyone but Maria, since Nevena is kind of a blank slate attempting to be like others, but when Maria is pointedly the villain, the question of whom we're supposed to sympathize with becomes muddled. Clearly, it's Nevena to a certain degree, but we end up sympathizing with her because she's denied the chance to be the subservient resource that society says she should be...?

Visually, I was somewhat disappointed, as well. The implications of the trailer gave me the idea that we would be seeing something that was much more phantasmagoric in nature and with camera work that involved the scenery in a more arresting fashion. Instead, we got a lot of very basic shots of mundane dwellings and not overly interesting forests and hillsides. Was the visual medium just the framework to hang all of those metaphors upon? Even when attempting that, you'd usually like to include something that was cool to look at while delivering your message. But most of the visual effects, involving a not atypical level of gore, weren't that impressive; not least because most of the transformations took place off-screen and were more audibly interesting than anything that showed up in the lens. It was as if someone had decided they wanted to do a version of The Howling but didn't have the money to pay for the CGI or makeup (which, for all I know, may have been the case.)

It sounds like I'm trashing the film, but I don't think it was bad, per se. I just think it was trying to do and say too many things at once and so didn't say any of them well at all. I'm still glad that I took the time to see it because it's not often we get to see something from that corner of the world. But I can't really recommend it to the horror fans I know, nor to the drama fans, nor to those who just like watching cool things happen on screen. It underdelivered in all of those respects, even though it was reaching higher than most other storytellers try to in the space of two hours.