Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: C+

Mable all the other critics and I are finally just diverting paths, because for the second time in a row, I’ve seen a movie widely praised that I left just thinking . . . Well, I don’t get it.

The best I can say about You Won’t Be Alone is it’s beautifully shot. It has a visual tone like a deeply disturbed, grotesque and fucked up horror version of a Terrence Malick movie. This is like Tree of Life if they replaced Brad Pitt with a profoundly scarred and bloodthirsty witch woman.

If that sounds like your bag, well, have a good time, I guess. I found it largely mystifying. At least, the second best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s better than the last one I went to see, Memoria, which bored me to death. I’ll grant You Won’t Be Alone this much: I wasn’t bored, even though it’s pacing is fairly measured. Its problem is that it’s not all that coherent.

I think I kind of get what writer-director Goran Stolevski is getting at with this story. A teenage girl is kidnapped by an ancient witch, who turns the girl into a witch. These witches have this nifty trick they can do, where after they kill a person, they open a hole into their chest, maybe where their heart is supposed to be, and fill it with a few handfuls of the victim’s innards. This allows them to shape-shift into the form of their victim. They can do this with all species, by the way; the opening shot is of a cat you only later realize was the old witch.

Anyway, once the young witch figures out how to shape shift, the movie becomes a succession of sequences in which she not only shape shifts but takes on the identify of the victim. The fact that, on average, the victim’s families and communities just accept them with a wildly different (and literally wild) personality, and having evidently become mute, doesn’t really make sense. Nor does the sequence in which the young witch discovers carnal desire and is surrounded by shirtless farmer men who are somehow all always pristine and clean. But, whatever. I guess that’s not the point, and the point is that this girl, who was raised to the age of sixteen hidden in a cave for fear of the old witch returning to her (which, of course, she does), is learning through immersion what it means to be “human.”

I’m not sure the horror genre always needs such high minded concepts. At first one might wonder why it even needed to be set in 19th century Macedonia, until you learn that Goran Stolevski, now Australian, was born in Macedonia and lived there through his teenage years. Maybe he chose the 19th century as a means of honoring his ancestors. With savage witches. Whatever.

In any case, I could follow You Won’t Be Alone fairly well until about halfway through. There’s a sequence in which a local villager girl, maybe nine or ten, has fallen off a cliff and died. The young witch takes on her form, and this was where the movie completely lost me. I don’t know if I blinked, or briefly nodded off, or what, but suddenly I had no idea what the hell was going on. I think there was a point at which it flashed back to when the old witch was burned at the stake and that explained her full body of burn scars, except the editing never made that clear at all. For some time I thought we had still been watching the young witch continue to shape shift and at some point she was the one who got caught and burned. Except then suddenly we’re back to other young people who are clearly the young witch, and without burns. I lost the thread of the movie there, and never managed to pick it up again. Mentally I threw my hands up, and just waited for it to be over.

I will say, though, that there is some incredible, layered, nuanced acting in this movie, particularly among the people playing those the young witch has shape shifted into. Probably the most famous person in this movie is Noomi Rapace, who shows up as one of the early people overtaken by the young witch (herself played excellently by Sara Klimoska). I was most impressed, though, by Carloto Cotta (Diamantino), who plays the first young man whose body the young witch takes over. The young witch uses him to experience sex as a man, but it’s the performance of the actor in that sex scene that is burned into my brain: his expressions of confusion, passion, pleasure, and surprise, all conveying a woman only just discovering truly human experiences, now experiencing them with a man’s body. Fascinating stuff . . . potentially, anyway.

The old witch is a bit of a sticking point for me. A lot of prosthetics and makeup going on there, with a clearly limited budget. Too many close-ups of her face, with somehow unblemished eyes and, particularly, eyelashes. Anamaria Marinca plays her as very strangely petty, with little revealed as to her motivations. I guess we just take it on faith that witches are grotesque and evil. A lot of the acting in the film otherwise is pretty stoic and forgettable, which largely neutralizes some of the incredible performances of a few supporting players.

Once again, though, I don’t have any idea who this movie is for. Pretentious intellectuals starved for cerebral analysys, I guess. Film critics eager for anything that stands out from the monotony of mainstream entertainment, who will sing its praises to readers who will mostly pass on the experience. I found the concept compelling, yet found it ultimately fell apart in the execution.

Overall: B-