Reel Entropy

9/10 You Won’t Be Alone made a little more than a quarter million in theaters, but what’s the point of writing about movies all the time if I’m not going to make time for one of the year’s best pictures. This is a breathtaking masterpiece of humanity, folklore and personal history.

Macedonia, 19th Century- A shape-shifting witch referred to as a “wolf-eatress” called Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca) comes for a newborn baby, but her desperate mother promises to give the child over to the witch a 16-year-old virgin so that Maria won’t be alone in her old age in exchange for being allowed to raise her for that time. Maria marks the baby, breaking her mouth and leaving her apparently mute for the rest of her life.

The mother tries her best to go back on their deal, raising Nevena in a hidden cave that she seems to think is holy ground, but 16 years later, Maria kills her and takes her daughter. Maria transforms Nevena into a witch, something she says she can only do once, but is immediately disappointed in the naïve, uneducated and non-verbal teenager and leaves her to fend for herself. Nevena (Sara Klimoska, Noomi Rapace, Carloto Cotta and Alice Englert) uses her new shapeshifting powers to sample lives across the preindustrial land, a blank slate thrust into the world already sexually mature, learning how to be human.