THE WASHINGTON POST
.
FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2022EZ
22
Movies
have died — or that they have
killed. That offers her a vicarious
way to experience what she could
not otherwise access.
While this is Nevena’s journey,
Maria continues to shadow her,
and Maria’s tragic backstory —along with the origin of her Old
Maid moniker — will eventually
come out, via flashback, as Neve-
na’s own search for herself plays
out. Stolevski is in no hurry to
throw down all his cards at once,
however, and the film is not for t heYou Won’t Be Alone
Witchy folk-horror film o≠ers its scares with a side of poetry
BY MICHAEL O'SULLIVAN
The international folk horror
renaissance, m arked by such shiv-
ery recent treats as the Icelandic
“Lamb” and the I rish “You Are Not
My Mother,” continues with “You
Won’t be Alone,” a creepy yet
hauntingly beautiful fable of a
witch who yearns to be human.
The assured feature debut of
Macedonian-born, Australia-
based Goran Stolevski (one of Va-
riety’s 10 directors to watch for
2022) is set in rural 19th-century
Macedonia, and opens with the
visit of a hideously burn-scarred
witch (Anamaria Marinca) —
known to villagers as both Old
Maid Maria and the Wolf-Eater-
ess, or Volkojatka — to a peasant
woman and her infant daughter,
Nevena.
Maria wants the baby. Tearful
bargaining ensues, in which Ma-
ria bites off the child’s tongue as a
down payment, so to speak, with
the understanding that she will
return to collect the girl when she
turns 16.
That’s quite the opening. But
you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Maria does return for her Neve-
na, long after her mother has hid-den her away in a cave, where the
girl grows to adolescence, de-
prived of a normal childhood.
Played by Sara Klimoska, a 27-
year-old Macedonian actress with
striking green-blue eyes, the mute
teenage Nevena is transformed
into a witch by Maria, who casts
her young quarry aside after the
girl proves inept at witchery.
Nevena narrates the film with an
inner monologue: a kind of bro-
ken-Macedonian poetry in which
she refers to herself as “me-the-
witch” to distinguish who she has
become from her former, clois-
tered self — a feral child, but not
yet a necromancer.
“You Won’t Be Alone” can be
ghoulish at times, but also gor-
geous, in the swooning manner of
a Terrence Malick film: all grass
and leaves and sky and water,
captured by tumbling camera-
work that evokes the wide-eyed
wonder of someone experiencing
the world for the first time. But
Nevena, whose fingers end in
black, clawlike nails, will never
again be accepted as fully human.
As it becomes clear over this slow-
ly unspooling story, witches are
shape-shifters and can assume
the form of people or animals thatimpatient. Stay with “A lone,”
though, and you will be rewarded
with a campfire story of a boogey-
man that also offers grown-up
pleasures.
Over the course of the film,
Nevena assumes the forms of two
women and a man, played by an
international trio of performers:
Sweden’s Noomi Rapace, France’s
Carloto C otta and Australia’s Alice
Englert. In the process, she learns
not what she has lost, but some-
thing she has never known: love.
The horror of this film — and it
is considerable, with a villain who
looks like Freddy Krueger and sev-
eral instances of bloody violence
— nevertheless takes a back seat to
a more expansive and ultimately
satisfying agenda. More than any-
thing, “You Won’t Be Alone” tells
the tale of a young woman who is
discovering — in this case, by su-
pernatural means — not just what
it costs to embrace her inner “me-
the-witch” but, as she puts it in her
poetic voice-over, “every last me.”BRANKO STARCEVIC/FOCUS FEATURES
Sara Klimoska, l eft, and Anamaria Marinca star in “You Won’t Be
Alone,” the feature debut of Macedonian-born Goran Stolevski.R. At area theaters. Contains
violence and gore, sexual material,
graphic nudity and sexual assault.
In Macedonian with subtitles.
109 minutes.housing. But half a century later,
the facade was pockmarked and
strewn with graffiti, a nd the i mmi-
grant residents for the most part
complained a bout the u nfit condi-
tions.
Not so for 16-year-old resident
Youri (Alseni Bathily), who
dreams of following in his name-
sake’s orbit. Youri’s mother has
taken up with a new boyfriend and
left h er son to fend for himself. But
he’s happy on his own, lookingthrough a t elescope a t the m oon —
and seeing what his friends Diana
(Lyna Khoudri o f “The French D is-
patch”) and Houssam (Jamil Mc-
Craven) are up to. With their help,
Youri tries to bring the crumbling
dinosaur up to code. They rewire
faulty elevators and replace
burned-out lights, scavenging for
materials from junkman Gérard
(Denis Lavant). Despite all their
hard work, Gagarine fails inspec-
tion, but Youri p lans to stay b ehindas long as possible.
If the junkyard suggests a low-
budget version of the “Star Wars”
trash-compactor scene, the indus-
trial setting evokes David Lynch’s
“Eraserhead,” which isn’t so un-
likely a resonance: Lynch’s feature
debut was l ikewise about a n imag-
inative young man s tuck i n a bleak
landscape.
In this dilapidated world, Youri
and his friends find joy just by
riding a bike. But Youri has higherGagarine
A 16-year-old dreams of space, home in soaring French drama
BY PAT PADUA
A space-age film score usually
suggests ominous science fiction.
But in the French coming-of-age
drama “Gagarine,” the electronic
music pulsates under scenes of a
very real and very earthbound
public housing project on the out-
skirts of Paris. Aided by a young
and talented c ast, writer-directors
Fanny Liatard a nd Jérémy Trouilh
have created a s tory set during the
last days of a n apartment building
slated for demolition. “Gagarine”
— which takes its name from Cité
Gagarine, a former housing com-
plex named after Soviet cosmo-
naut Yuri Gagarin and torn down
over 16 months beginning in 2019
— achieves metaphorical liftoff.
The filmmakers make just as
much magic on the ground as
some do in space.
Gagarine, as the structure was
commonly known, held great
promise w hen i t opened in 1963 in
Ivry-sur-Seine. A pre-credit se-
quence shows footage of the dedi-
cation, with Gagarin himself in
attendance and thousands cheer-
ing the prospect of affordableambitions. With Gagarine’s sky-
high elevator shafts already sug-
gesting a massive spaceship, the
teenager improbably begins to
build his own craft. But can he
really take off?
The first half of “Gagarine” plays
like a neorealist drama, and Victor
Seguin’s gorgeous cinematography
swoops around the broken proper-
ty with a bird’s-eye view, gracefully
following Youri a nd his crew as t hey
struggle with their quixotic task.
The same camerawork that cap-
tures residents’ gritty lives prepares
the viewer for the magic realism of
its final a ct. But there’s j ust as much
enchantment in what for most peo-
ple would be a dreary setting. The
most haunting scene may be of
Youri and Diana sending Morse
code messages to each other one
lonely night.
Liatard and Trouilh, who co-
wrote the script with Benjamin
Charbit, were commissioned to
make documentary portraits of Ga-
garine residents in 2014, when the
premises were first targeted for
demolition, and spent several years
getting to know the people and
SEE GAGARINE ON 23COHEN MEDIA GROUP
Alseni Bathily stars in “Gagarine” as Youri, who tries to save his crumbling apartment building and
also harbors loftier ambitions. Bathily’s father grew up in the housing complex that inspired the film.