“What a piece of work is man!” Neither of the ravenous witches in “You Won’t Be Alone” actually quote Shakespeare, but that astonished sentiment informs every beat of first-time feature filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s ruminative supernatural tale, set in the rustic hillside villages of 19th-century Macedonia.
To which millions of horror movie fans will reply: Uh, no thanks, I’ll wait for something more American, with some dead babysitters in it. Fine. Nevertheless: Focus Features picked up Stolevski’s film for theatrical distribution, so here we are. And I’m glad we are here, even if a recent preview screening had people bee-lining for the exits long before things wrapped up.
In “You Won’t Be Alone,” the hills are alive with the sound of screaming, whenever the presence of Old Maid Maria, the witch also known as the Wolf-Eateress, can be felt. In the film’s opening minutes, the burn-scarred witch (Anamaria Marinca, smiling like a hag who knows she has the upper hand) makes a hard bargain with a peasant woman: Raise your infant daughter, and I’ll come back for her when she turns 16.
From there “You Won’t Be Alone” combines a tale of no-win parenting with the pungent, oddly delicate persuasion of an old folk tale imagined anew. The girl, Nevena, rendered mute by the witch, is raised in a cave by her real mother. Once she’s collected by Old Maid Maria, she learns how to become whomever or whatever she kills.
Much of the film follows the grown Nevena as she transforms into three different humans, one of them played by Noomi Rapace of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and, more recently, the Icelandic film “Lamb,” which lies closer to this film’s funky earthbound supernaturalism.
The young witch’s human education reveals to her a “burning, hurting thing, this world,” as she says in subtitled Macedonian-language voice-over. As in 2014′s “Under the Skin,” we are seeing the world, and all sorts of rough, beautiful, carnal, elusive discoveries, through the eyes of a societal outsider.
Stolevski, based in Australia, shoots his film with close, tight hand-held camerawork, and at times it evokes what might happen if Terrence Malick took on a less comforting corner of the natural world. It’s more essay than straight-ahead narrative, but that is simply a fact, not a flaw. In every design detail, the physical production and realization of “You Won’t Be Alone” really does take you somewhere. However unsettling, it’s a film that knows what it’s doing.
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'YOU WON’T BE ALONE'
3 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for violence and gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, and sexual assault)
Running time: 1:49
Where to watch: In theaters Friday
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