MIFF Session #6: YOU WON'T BE ALONE

A village woman makes a pact with folkloric witch figure whereby the latter won't kill the woman's child, Nevena, in infancy but take her after the girl has had a chance at life. The witch, Old Maid Maria, who looks like one of the damned in the Hellraiser movies, agrees but scratches the baby anyway, removing her voice. The mother hides her daughter in a cave for years but to no avail. The child is claimed by the Maria and taken. She is then inducted into the life of a body jumping demon known by the locals as a wolf-eatress. Told to go and fend for herself, she does, going from body to body, learning, each time, about the ways of humans that she witnesses for the first time since leaving seclusion. These transitions are not always smooth and some are near disastrous as one life is taken, another is assumed. Now and then a wolf-eatress is discovered and dealt with by fire. That's always on the cards.

This cinema verite folk horror tale feels like it has been told to you from childhood and you are only now seeing it unfold in visual form. There is very little expository guidance and you are essentially in the same position as Nevena learns with each transition, about marriage, sex, social order and so on and the Breughelian expression of them that we, too, will find alien. Of particular note is Noomi Rapace's turn as a young village mother who learns of domestic violence, narrated by the initial actor playing Nevena. She must mime her way through each local ritual or custom like gossip or female servitude in marriage (Nevena's lack of voice applies to everyone whose body she assumes). Other incarnations variously amuse or confront. Since we're talking about performances here, I can't leave until I've mentioned how magnetic and edgy turn by Annamaria Marinca in the role of the demonic Maria who offers a command so gently confident it renders her intimidating every time we see her.

Shot in a claustrophobic 4X3 ratio, the colours and life of the Balkan countryside are brought vividly and claustrophobically to life, illustrated from a sourced score of mostly classical pieces. While the beauty of the land and nature might remind of a Terrence Malik, the violence and hard superstition might more recall a Red Psalms or Wicker Man. this leads to a problem: just after the halfway mark, we have seen so much of the procedure of the wolf-eatress escape through body jumping or educate herself by it and old Maria turn up for check-ins the overall arc starts grinding down. The finale offers strong and definite action but we are exhausted by then and wish we had seen the end about twenty minutes earlier.

That said, there is so much promise and creativity on screen that I'll be looking out for the further films of Goran Stolevski whose next project (according to himself at the Q&A) will be a contemporary comedy. I'll be in the queue.