In writer-director Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone, a witch known as the Wolf-Eateress (Anamaria Marinca) has haunted the mountainous landscape of a remote Macedonian village for centuries, always on the hunt for the fresh blood of animals or newborn babies. The 19th-century villagers use her as a way to scare children from wandering far from home, but she’s no bogeyman. She’s widely acknowledged to be real, and her feeding on infants is an inevitability that the villagers simply accept as part of their fate.
One day, the hungry Wolf-Eateress shows up at the bedside of an infant named Nevena, whose mother, Yoana (Kamka Tocinovski), is able to prevent her from being sucked dry by making a pact with the witch: provide the Wolf-Eateress with another child to feed on, and hand over Nevena when she turns 16. When the witch leaves, though not before slicing Nevena’s tongue with her claw and rendering her mute, Yoana proceeds to hide the child in a cave, fearing the witch’s return but also leaving Nevena to grow up feral and oblivious to the world around her.
Throughout You Won’t Be Alone, Stolevski rejects the slickness that defines so-called elevated horror. Instead of ominous slow zooms and a methodical intensification of atmosphere, Stolevski’s approach to folk horror is more fragmented and abrasive, yet also ethereal. Blending the ontological musings and transcendentalism of Terrence Malick’s cinema with visceral body horror, the film is as disconcerting as it is spellbinding in its contemplation of the nature of gender, identity, and existence itself. It’s an uneasy balance of styles and tones that don’t always gel, but they ultimately work in unison to illuminate You Won’t Be Alone’s notions of the sublime and the horrific that it attributes to both nature and man.
When the now-16-year-old Nevena (Sara Klimoska) goes off with the Wolf-Eateress, the film begins to hew to the young woman’s perspective, employing a hushed, philosophical voiceover that one associates with Malick’s work in order to let us into her mind. These lines—by and large primitive and mystifying thoughts—are entirely in broken Macedonian, and they exude a poetic cadence that recalls Bruno S.’s dialogue in Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser or Benjy’s internal monologue from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Once Nevena gains immortality, through a gruesome and creepily framed ritual in which the Wolf-Eateress scrapes the girl’s chest with her claws and spits blood into the wound, You Won’t Be Alone shifts into an even more unsettling register as its narrative becomes more fractured. Up to this point, we’ve seen glimpses of the witch morphing into a wolf, and when Nevena accidentally kills a mother, Bosilka (Noomi Rapace), who’s protecting her newborn from the intruding girl, we learn of Nevena’s newfound ability to shapeshift into the form of any of her victims, first taking their heart and organs and then their physical form.
The subsequent scenes where Nevena takes over the bodies of everyone from Bosilka to a man who tries to rape her, even a dog, are shot through with a dark undercurrent of humor, given Nevena’s lack of understanding of human interaction and the awkwardness with which she inhabits these bodies. But Stolevski and the actors play these scenarios straight, which also spikes You Won’t Be Alone with an almost unnerving earnestness, especially across scenes in which Nevena, in her many forms, comes to learn of sex, labor, love, hate, and compassion.
The Wolf-Eateress allows Nevena to have this freedom, but the witch is also always waiting around the corner to scold and mock the girl for her desire to live as a human. The nihilism of this character is akin to that of countless witches in cinema, but late in the film Stolevski delivers a backstory that completely reconfigures our understanding of the Wolf-Eaterness and how she came to be. It’s an incredibly sad tale of human cruelty and indifference toward women’s suffering, yet it unfolds as Nevena is coming into her own, able to sense the savagery of mankind but also the beauty and euphoria of existence as well. Fittingly, You Won’t Be Alone ends with a phrase repeated throughout that reflects the tension between these two states of being: “It’s a burning, breaking thing. This world. And yet…and yet…”
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