Even at their most chameleonic, actors remain fundamentally themselves as every character they play. That’s unavoidable in a profession that involves employing your body as an instrument of sorts—you can tweak every dial of voice, gesture, and posture, but some essence of You remains, irreplicable by anyone else on Earth (even if you have an identical twin; just ask Linda Hamilton’s or Nicholas Brendon’s). This becomes especially clear when different actors take on the same role. Despite Julianne Moore’s preternatural talent, it’s nearly impossible to accept her Clarice Starling in Hannibal as the same person we saw in The Silence of the Lambs, simply because she’s so very much Moore and so very little Jodie Foster. The most effective and celebrated instance, perhaps, is De Niro’s remarkable suggestion of Brando’s Don Corleone as a younger man in The Godfather: Part II; his own unique qualities bleed through the expert mimicry, though, which is why Hollywood has embraced (with shaky results thus far) technological innovations that de-age actors, allowing a continuity of performance that would otherwise be impossible.
It's a real act of chutzpah, then, for a movie to explore the mysteries of identity via a single character who’s played by multiple, wildly disparate actors. This approach was at least interesting—if not, to my mind, entirely successful—in Todd Haynes’ anti-biopic I’m Not There, the very title of which acknowledges that its six incarnations of Bob Dylan (played by everyone from Richard Gere to Cate Blanchett) constitute structuring absences. Applied to an ordinary person lacking any cultural baggage, the concept floundered in Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, and does so again in the new horror(-ish) film You Won’t Be Alone, which passes its protagonist’s baton to six different performers from nearly as many different countries. (I didn’t see Every Day, another recent example; it doesn’t seem to have been particularly well received.) Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski certainly doesn’t lack for ambition, but his first feature tries to do several difficult things at once and fumbles pretty much all of them; that we can’t get a hold on the individual at its center, who keeps metamorphosing into someone else, only amplifies the frustration.
Stolevski also wrote You Won’t Be Alone’s screenplay, and does his best to make Novena—that’s evidently her name, though it’s rarely spoken for reasons that will soon become apparent—as much of a blank slate as possible. First seen as an infant, she’s claimed, for lack of a better verb, by a badly burned and temperamentally terrifying woman known as Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca, who played the lead in Romanian Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), whom the subtitles sometimes call a witch and sometimes call a “Wolf-Eateress.” (The latter term probably sounds better in Macedonian.) Her desperate mother successfully strikes a bargain in which Maria will wait until Novena turns 16, then proceeds to hide her in a cave (with a lockable door as entrance; there are abundant fairy-tale elements here), where she will spend her entire childhood in complete isolation. Sort of a Room scenario, except that in this case the “room” is a massive cylindrical hollow with enormous walls climbing to the sky. Imagine a gorgeous, much bigger version of The Dark Knight Rises’ pit. All downhill from this striking location.
Anyway, this stratagem predictably does not work: Maria shows up promptly when Novena (now played by Sara Klimoska) turns 16 and proceeds to turn her into a witch/Wolf-Eateress as well—a transformation that she can perform, we’re told, only once, apparently by way of creating an heir. Or something. Many details of You Won’t Be Alone are left unclear, not the least of which is what, exactly, these two women are; they’re basically witches, but they need to drink blood like vampires, and they also have the ability to shape-shift. We see Maria spontaneously transform into various animals (cat, wolf, pig), but Novena instead either transfers her soul into or assumes the form of other human beings—it’s not clear which (Stolevski makes a point of keeping these moments visually ambiguous), nor is it clear whether she’s doing it voluntarily. Maybe it just happens. Mostly, it serves as a vehicle for this young woman to experience life as multiple people: an abused wife (Noomi Rapace), a male laborer (Carloto Cotta), an adored little girl (Anastasija Karanovich) who grows up (into Ginger & Rosa’s Alice Englert, who’s also Jane Campion’s daughter) and finds love with an equally mute hunk (Félix Maritaud).
Oh, did I forget to mention that Novena doesn’t talk? Old Maid Maria either stole or stilled her tongue (again, it’s unclear) when she was a baby, which allows Stolevski not to worry about what language the various actors playing her speak. Instead, we hear her thoughts in voiceover, spoken in what’s reportedly an archaic Macedonian dialect (when the film takes place is—again!—unclear, but it seems to be long ago) and subtitled in deliberately broken English, suggesting that her isolation impeded linguistic development. This ongoing, vaguely Malick-esque narration, reminiscent of what we hear from Holly in Badlands and Linda in Days of Heaven, has to do most of the heavy lifting, character-wise. Because Novena has been conceived as largely unformed, the actors who play her all assume a generic wide-eyed wonder at the beauty and cruelty of existence; some (Rapace) do this better than others (Cotta), but the intriguing idea of someone with no identity of her own trying on others’ like suits of clothes never really takes hold. I thought that Room whiffed by not finding a visual correlative for the sudden, overwhelming expansion of little Jack’s universe, and assumed, upon seeing You Won’t Be Alone kick off in the square-ish Academy ratio, that Stolevski had avoided making the same mistake. But no: The film’s aspect ratio never shifts, and we consequently never get a visceral sense of how Novena sees the world. She’s just a blank slate in various guises, with no resonance for those seeking to construct themselves.
And then there’s the movie’s horror(-ish) aspect, which keeps getting in the way of what should be an offbeat character study. Old Maid Maria provides Marinca with her most memorable role since 4/3/2—she gives a genuinely unsettling performance underneath a great deal of unconvincing scar-tissue makeup—but the character makes no damn sense. She shows up at the beginning to claim Novena (why this particular infant? who knows?), “turns” her in classic vampire style, quickly gets fed up with her disobedience and tells her to fend for herself, and then proceeds to show up and pointlessly taunt every incarnation of Novena, each time cackling something to the effect of “Being a human isn’t as easy as you thought, eh? They’re gonna catch onto you soon!” Eventually, we get an entire flashback revealing what happened to Maria, which turns out to be exactly what you’d expect of a woman who’s called a witch and spent significant time aflame at some point. (If you want to see that movie, seek out Dreyer’s masterful Day of Wrath.) This misogynistic history in no way informs Novena’s search for her authentic self, and the way that Stolevski resolves these two women’s virtually nonexistent conflict feels both arbitrary and irrelevant. (It doesn’t help that the film’s final act is accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s “Für Alina” and “Spiegel im Spiegel,” pieces that became art-movie clichés 20 years ago when they suddenly turned up in everything from Gus Van Sant’s Gerry to Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away.) At the end of You Won’t Be Alone, we know little more about Novena than we did at the beginning. That’s the inherent risk of giving her so many forms…though “Novena” derives from “nine,” so maybe the movie just needed a handful more.
One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.
It's a real act of chutzpah, then, for a movie to explore the mysteries of identity via a single character who’s played by multiple, wildly disparate actors. This approach was at least interesting—if not, to my mind, entirely successful—in Todd Haynes’ anti-biopic I’m Not There, the very title of which acknowledges that its six incarnations of Bob Dylan (played by everyone from Richard Gere to Cate Blanchett) constitute structuring absences. Applied to an ordinary person lacking any cultural baggage, the concept floundered in Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, and does so again in the new horror(-ish) film You Won’t Be Alone, which passes its protagonist’s baton to six different performers from nearly as many different countries. (I didn’t see Every Day, another recent example; it doesn’t seem to have been particularly well received.) Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski certainly doesn’t lack for ambition, but his first feature tries to do several difficult things at once and fumbles pretty much all of them; that we can’t get a hold on the individual at its center, who keeps metamorphosing into someone else, only amplifies the frustration.
Stolevski also wrote You Won’t Be Alone’s screenplay, and does his best to make Novena—that’s evidently her name, though it’s rarely spoken for reasons that will soon become apparent—as much of a blank slate as possible. First seen as an infant, she’s claimed, for lack of a better verb, by a badly burned and temperamentally terrifying woman known as Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca, who played the lead in Romanian Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), whom the subtitles sometimes call a witch and sometimes call a “Wolf-Eateress.” (The latter term probably sounds better in Macedonian.) Her desperate mother successfully strikes a bargain in which Maria will wait until Novena turns 16, then proceeds to hide her in a cave (with a lockable door as entrance; there are abundant fairy-tale elements here), where she will spend her entire childhood in complete isolation. Sort of a Room scenario, except that in this case the “room” is a massive cylindrical hollow with enormous walls climbing to the sky. Imagine a gorgeous, much bigger version of The Dark Knight Rises’ pit. All downhill from this striking location.
Anyway, this stratagem predictably does not work: Maria shows up promptly when Novena (now played by Sara Klimoska) turns 16 and proceeds to turn her into a witch/Wolf-Eateress as well—a transformation that she can perform, we’re told, only once, apparently by way of creating an heir. Or something. Many details of You Won’t Be Alone are left unclear, not the least of which is what, exactly, these two women are; they’re basically witches, but they need to drink blood like vampires, and they also have the ability to shape-shift. We see Maria spontaneously transform into various animals (cat, wolf, pig), but Novena instead either transfers her soul into or assumes the form of other human beings—it’s not clear which (Stolevski makes a point of keeping these moments visually ambiguous), nor is it clear whether she’s doing it voluntarily. Maybe it just happens. Mostly, it serves as a vehicle for this young woman to experience life as multiple people: an abused wife (Noomi Rapace), a male laborer (Carloto Cotta), an adored little girl (Anastasija Karanovich) who grows up (into Ginger & Rosa’s Alice Englert, who’s also Jane Campion’s daughter) and finds love with an equally mute hunk (Félix Maritaud).
Oh, did I forget to mention that Novena doesn’t talk? Old Maid Maria either stole or stilled her tongue (again, it’s unclear) when she was a baby, which allows Stolevski not to worry about what language the various actors playing her speak. Instead, we hear her thoughts in voiceover, spoken in what’s reportedly an archaic Macedonian dialect (when the film takes place is—again!—unclear, but it seems to be long ago) and subtitled in deliberately broken English, suggesting that her isolation impeded linguistic development. This ongoing, vaguely Malick-esque narration, reminiscent of what we hear from Holly in Badlands and Linda in Days of Heaven, has to do most of the heavy lifting, character-wise. Because Novena has been conceived as largely unformed, the actors who play her all assume a generic wide-eyed wonder at the beauty and cruelty of existence; some (Rapace) do this better than others (Cotta), but the intriguing idea of someone with no identity of her own trying on others’ like suits of clothes never really takes hold. I thought that Room whiffed by not finding a visual correlative for the sudden, overwhelming expansion of little Jack’s universe, and assumed, upon seeing You Won’t Be Alone kick off in the square-ish Academy ratio, that Stolevski had avoided making the same mistake. But no: The film’s aspect ratio never shifts, and we consequently never get a visceral sense of how Novena sees the world. She’s just a blank slate in various guises, with no resonance for those seeking to construct themselves.
And then there’s the movie’s horror(-ish) aspect, which keeps getting in the way of what should be an offbeat character study. Old Maid Maria provides Marinca with her most memorable role since 4/3/2—she gives a genuinely unsettling performance underneath a great deal of unconvincing scar-tissue makeup—but the character makes no damn sense. She shows up at the beginning to claim Novena (why this particular infant? who knows?), “turns” her in classic vampire style, quickly gets fed up with her disobedience and tells her to fend for herself, and then proceeds to show up and pointlessly taunt every incarnation of Novena, each time cackling something to the effect of “Being a human isn’t as easy as you thought, eh? They’re gonna catch onto you soon!” Eventually, we get an entire flashback revealing what happened to Maria, which turns out to be exactly what you’d expect of a woman who’s called a witch and spent significant time aflame at some point. (If you want to see that movie, seek out Dreyer’s masterful Day of Wrath.) This misogynistic history in no way informs Novena’s search for her authentic self, and the way that Stolevski resolves these two women’s virtually nonexistent conflict feels both arbitrary and irrelevant. (It doesn’t help that the film’s final act is accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s “Für Alina” and “Spiegel im Spiegel,” pieces that became art-movie clichés 20 years ago when they suddenly turned up in everything from Gus Van Sant’s Gerry to Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away.) At the end of You Won’t Be Alone, we know little more about Novena than we did at the beginning. That’s the inherent risk of giving her so many forms…though “Novena” derives from “nine,” so maybe the movie just needed a handful more.
One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.
