Oh, those darn witches. They just won’t stop killing, eating, and impersonating dead Macedonian goat herders, will they? For shame, witches. Shame, I tell you. Now, aren’t you just a little embarrassed? You go sit in that rock cave for a decade and think about what you’ve done.
This picture is a confusing one. And it’s not just because I don’t understand a lick of Macedonian… although that sure didn’t help any, did it? If the subtitles could just tell you what’s going on along with translating the dialogue, I’d be much better off; but I’d still dislike this film.
Let me see if I can describe the things I did understand. This is a film about witches. I’m gonna call them skin witches because their whole thing is killing dudes and then becoming the person they killed … for a while. There didn’t seem to be rules here. The whole thing is set in 19th Century Macedonia. 19th Century rural Macedonia: come for the goats; stay for the misogyny. Why 19th Century rural Macedonia? My best guess is that 19th Century rural Macedonians were among the most boring people ever created. They needed skin witches just to have something talk about for the next decade or so:
“Hey, remember when the skin witch killed Glurz and impersonated him for a month?”
“Oh yeah, good times.”
At the start of the film, the skin witch visits the mother of an infant. The mother pleads for her daughter’s survival, essentially bargaining for sixteen years of “freedom.” Then mom takes the baby and hides her away in a “sacred” rock cave, where the child grows up learning absolutely nothing … not even how to speak. Unafraid of whatever sanctity the cave might have, the skin witch comes anyway, kills the mom and claims the daughter.
Then the witch makes the daughter into a skin witch, too. Ok, now we’re getting somewhere, right? Sort of. At this point, the witch discovers she has absolutely no patience to teach the child what she don’t know … which is, admittedly, A LOT. So three miles into her new role as mother/teacher/governess, the witch gives up on the child, abandoning the teenager entirely with a (forgive the “South Park”-ism) “screw you guys, I’m going home.”
So … teenwitch on her own. Check it out; it’s Macedonian Sabrina. The “girl” takes her about 30 seconds to accidentally kill somebody, and then, hey! She’s a new person; isn’t that fun? I think the iteration of the character here is played by Noomi Rapace, which is notable only
in that you might be reminded that Noomi Rapace was pretty good in those Dragon Tattoo films … and pretty crappy ever since.
The general theme in You Won’t Be Alone is: “Can a skin witch learn to be a real girl?” Noomi is just one iteration of this character. “Nevena” will transform into being a man and a woman again before this thing is done. During this time, they get to experience sex from both the offense and defense perspective … which would have been more fun if the film had been either less confusing or gave us better characters. I was confused whenever Nevena switched bodies; the one underlying consistency that finally pulled me into understanding was Nevena doesn’t know shit about anything.
“Highly lethal without understanding” isn’t the worst set-up for a protagonist, but I found the characterization –and film for that matter- fairly boring despite the sensationalistic sex and blood. Basically, there’s only one character of note; it doesn’t know anything and wanders around for a while before it either has sex or kills somebody or both. All of its actions seem incidental. I found it impossible to root for that character for both its lack of understanding and the fact that it keeps changing bodies. Part of the issue here was in a cinematography and direction that gave little clarity as to what was going on in any given scene; the viewer is asked to piece it together in retrospect at several different intervals. I heard this was a decent horror film; I’m more than a little disappointed.
There once was a skin-stealing witch
Who killed a guy and made a body switch
The man was to wed
But this happened instead
So the ceremony went off without a hitch
Rated R, 108 Minutes
Director: Goran Stolevski
Writer: Goran Syolevski
Genre: Body switching … except less fun and more AAAAHHHHHH!!!!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Macedonian witches
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: WTF?!
