It was Kate Bush who first asked to “exchange the experience.” In You Won’t Be Alone — Goran Stolevski’s ravishing first feature — it’s Macedonian feral child-turned-shapeshifter Nevena who puts that desire to good use. What reads from its logline (“a young girl is kidnapped and then transformed into a witch by an ancient spirit”) as a 19th century folk horror of body-snatching, the film emerges quite unexpectedly as a touching and highly naturalistic ode to the beauties and sorrows of living. For Nevena — portrayed with a naïve mercy by Sara Klimoska — can take on the forms of others by pressing their organs into her chest, a grisly element of her occult apprenticeship at the ambivalent hands of the Wolf-Eateress Old Maid Maria (Annamaria Marinca). But whoever first called You Won’t Be Alone a horror film was dead wrong: the film instead repurposes genre convention to gracefully immerse its heroine — and its viewers — into the totality of human experience, forwarding a concept of physical surrender, a “melting into” the world, quite akin to rebirth.
“Make me blacknesses,” Nevena whispers from the confinement of her holy cave in the film’s early sequences. Sequestered for all her young life by her mother for fear of Maria’s child-killing scourge on the countryside, the film’s eyes and ears are limited to stone walls and the occasional snowfall that drifts in through the cave’s natural oculus. From the get-go, a heightened awareness of natural textures and the shockingly porous boundary between body and land qualifies You Won’t Be Alone’s highly attuned handheld camera. This spoken desire — this “make me blacknesses” — elucidates the film’s central passion: the possibility of dissolving oneself completely into the spectrum of earthly and human experiences, of divorcing oneself from the body to live the world through another’s senses.
After her liberation from the cave by Maria, Nevena does so with abandon; killing village woman Bosilka (Noomi Rapace) and taking her shape, she sets off on an immersion into the so-called “normal” life otherwise prohibited to her. With an almost sublime curiosity, director Stolevski and cinematographer Matthew Chuang feast on granular material: glistening moss, water slipping over rocks, sunlight passing through wheat. Likewise, Nevena relishes being reborn as someone else, letting the water from wet laundry drip on her face as Bosilka, stretching her sinuous muscles as the strapping Boris (Carloto Cotta), scampering through high grasses as a big black dog, taking off her shirt and “clothing herself in sun.” By matching its heroine’s inquisitiveness with its own sumptuous visual language, You Won’t Be Alone incarnates the sensation of novelty for the mundane, an almost infantile wonder that dwindles the longer one stays human.
It is in the constant body-swapping that the film expresses a more profound inquiry into the nature of being. Beginning with a desire perhaps to lose herself in the sensations of this world, Nevena’s shapeshifting develops in her a recognition of a truer, non-corporeal self. “Me the skin they will bury,” she reflects wistfully, “but me the witch? They can’t.” This recognition of the separation of body and soul is where You Won’t Be Alone finds its tenderness — and where, perhaps, the film might bring a few happy tears to a critic’s eyes. With a bit of blood magic — or perhaps an imaginative openness to experience — the film acknowledges the possibility of fusing oneself joyfully into the flow of human life. There is a shapeless, cosmic being within that sack of skin; where the self resides is one of the film’s constant preoccupations, one that it answers with a gracious and infinite “everywhere.”
For its viewers, trapped in the malleable but bounded bodies in which they were born, the film asserts the staggering variance of the human adventure with Nevena’s simple, astonished recognition: “I didn’t know it could be like this.” There is much more to the story than one lifetime can ever channel, many more loves and hurts and bodies to play with, many more ways to smell “skin like dirt,” to feel “sun like liquid.” Though it launches itself into the living current by supernatural means, You Won’t Be Alone is surprisingly and movingly simple. “It” — this life — is different for all its creatures; meld yourself into it and you may find that your singular body can no longer fit your many-faced soul.
