You Won't Be Alone

The Witches
Of Eat, Spit

You Won't Be Alone
United Kingdom/Serbia/Australia 2022
Directed by Goran Stolevski
Focus Features

Warning: Some slight spoilerage.

You Won’t Be Alone received it’s official UK premiere at this years London Film Festival. It’s a really nice slice of folk horror set in Macedonia in the 19th Century and it would have made a nice addition to Severin’s All The Haunts Be Ours box set, it has to be said. The film stars many great actresses such as Alice Englert (from Ginger And Rosa, reviewed here), Anamaria Marinca, Sara Klimoska with, due to the constantly shifting nature of identity in the story, some of them taking on dual roles, such as the absolutely marvellous Noomi Rapace, who puts in an extra special turn here... I’ll get to her in a minute.

The film tells of a witch living near a small farming community, who comes to claim a mother’s daughter on pretty much the day she is born. The mother strikes a bargain that she will only give her offspring up to live with the witch when she reaches 16 and the witch marks her, removing her power of speech. The mother tries to cheat the witch by hiding her daughter in a sacred cave, isolated from her community, for the next 16 years but, somewhat predictably, the witch still claims her prize and uses her last ‘witch spit’ to seal a wound she gives the girl, bestowing special witchy powers on her, also. However, her ‘apprentice’ angers her and she abandons her to life among the normal humans and watches from the wings, waiting to see how long it will take before the humans will rip her apart. And that’s all I’m telling you of the story... you’ll have to see how the pair of witches fair.

The film starts very strongly, in an unusual 1.44:1 aspect ratio, with a shot of a cat eating something in the foreground of a beautiful landscape, before we suddenly take the cats eye view for the camera as she rushes to a hovel where the new child is living... jumping back into a third person view. I was somewhat puzzled by this choice at first (and it’s not the only time the camera does this) but since the film is put together using occasional, still and static shots interspersed into sections with both fluid camerawork and almost brutal, in your face, hand held camera stuff... it doesn’t feel so out of place as to knock you out of the story. And it makes more sense when you realise it’s the form a witch is taking in certain scenes and used to indicate that in a visual manner without showing the witch transforming... a tactic used throughout the length of the movie although, in one shot where a witch transforms into a dog, it’s done in camera and looks amazing. It also reminded me of similar cat POV style shots used in another classic tale involving witches potions... Morgiana (reviewed here).

There’s a brilliant moment early in the film where you see just how the young girl with newly bestowed powers transforms, which is quite eerie and striking... pulling out the internal organs of someone (or something in the case of the animals) she has just killed, ripping a hole out of her torso and then shoving the organs into her own body to essentially turn into a doppelganger of that person. The film then proceeds to follow the girl as she takes on new identities throughout the movie... man, woman and animal... in order to silently hoodwink the humans around her and try to fit in. So the film becomes almost a ‘fish out of water’ comedy in some ways... but with no humour in it, just stripped back to the point where the lack of fitting in is seen as some kind of unhinged mental condition on occasion.

Which brings me to the wonderful Noomi Rapace who, in the role of a young mother killed and replaced by the girl, tries to fit in with the community in such ways that actually give the film a sense of lurking dread and strangeness. There’s one sequence in particular where she’s imitating the women-folk of the community by laughing joyously on cue and then dropping back to a straight, emotionless face before attempting it again a number of times, which really makes the blood grow cold.

All this plus the poetic voice over narrative of the young witch, combined with some heavy and unhurried musical statements with long pauses between lines, makes for a really nice combination and singles You Won’t Be Alone out as one of the more interesting and rewarding examples of folk horror cinema for a while. It’s a slow burn of a feature with some amazing, stand out moments which punctuate the pacing and it kind of gets under your skin as you watch. Definitely a strong recommendation from me and I’d urge fans of unusual cinema to check this one out as soon as the opportunity arises.

Brand New Cherry Flavour

Once Kitten, Twice Shy

Brand New Cherry Flavour
Season 1 August 2021 - 8 episodes
Canada/USA

Warning: Very minor spoilers to give a flavour.

Okay, so Brand New Cherry Flavour is a series based on a novel of the same name by Todd Grimson. Once again, I have to forewarn you that I haven’t read the novel in question... yet, so I don’t know how good of an adaptation it is... I suspect there might have been some elements which were toned down for TV but that’s just a gut feeling.

The story set up is of main protagonist Lisa Nova, played here by the wonderful Rose Salazar... who also co-produced this show. It’s the early 1990s and she returns to Los Angeles to crash at her ex-boyfriends place while she tries to pitch her first feature film, based on the short movie she’s just made of horrific things going on in the woods. Erik Lange plays film producer Lou, who buys her movie, with her agreeing to that on the condition she gets to direct it. However, after she refuses to let Lou sleaze his way into her panties as part of the deal, he steals her movie and employs another person to direct. Lisa is so infuriated that she hires the services of a local witch, Boro, played by Catherine Keener, to put a curse on him to ‘set his life on fire’ and get her movie back. However, there’s more to things than meets the eye and it’s a long and twisted road until the end game is in sight.

And it’s a fairly okay TV show to be honest. It’s not as weird, dark or sexy as I’d been informed when I got interested in it but it is fairly entertaining. There are a lot of different ingredients to the show which includes the main witch, a faceless lady who may or may not be related to someone in Lisa’s past, the bitter ‘actress with one eye’ who starred in the original short, more traditional zombies, hired assassins, a trail of bloody corpses, sex spells, blood spells and a heck of a lot of vomiting up kittens... Lisa’s price for Boro’s services.

However, with all these elements which go into the show, it manages to not go through any tonal shifts throughout the eight episodes and that’s a double edged sword. It’s great that the show is so focused but the story arc gets a little over explored by about episode five and, although Salazar and a whole bunch of other actors... such as Jeff Ward and Siena Werber... are really great in this, it does get a bit monotone on occasion. Not to say it gets dull but, yeah, the odd tonal shift or two might well have been a way of ramping it up a little towards the end, to be honest.

However, coupled with the great acting are some good special effects (there’s a fair amount of blood and gore on display here), some nice shot designs with some bright washes of Mario Bava style lightning on occasion (especially in the early episodes) and a fair few surprises here and there. I especially liked episode four, which delves deeply into the world of David Cronenberg at one point, even pushing the sexuality in that one a little further than Cronenberg might have gotten away with in his day (there’s some fairly unusual fisting going on in a sex scene but I don’t want to say too much about why it’s unique here because it would be a spoiler) and, for me, this was the high point of the series. Although, on the down side, who the heck takes a bath wearing their knickers?

There’s some great dialogue in here too. I didn’t think of this thing as a horror show to begin with but, after I’d watched the first six episodes, I was describing the plot to somebody and, yeah, they’re right, it absolutely is part of the horror genre. There’s even a scene where you can glimpse George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead playing on a TV set in the corner of a room. And there are also some very fan pleasing genre references such as, when Lisa is trying to coax a good performance out of her lead actress when making the short (something we see later in flashback), telling her, “I need you full on Isabelle Adjani Possession level!”... which is going to bring smiles to a lot of faces of people who remember the ‘milk scene’ from that movie, I suspect. And, also, there are some unusual, epically quotable lines scattered throughout the show such as, “That bitch just puked a cat!”

The series is actually left a little open ended, in a way, although I’m not sure you’d really want to see a sequel to this and I can’t believe there’s a heck of a lot of the book left to adapt, to be honest. That being said, I would be curious as to seeing what the few surviving characters get up to next. There’s also the odd plot point left unresolved which, I suspect, might well have been something shot (and it’s too late to work it in now even if it was, because the specific plot point I’m thinking of had an expiry date in terms of the continuing mortality of one of the characters) but I guess that’s one we’re not going to see cleared up anytime soon. Either way, Brand New Cherry Flavour, while not as ‘out there’ as I’d been set up to expect, is still a fun watch and Rose Salazar, who I’d loved in Alita: Battle Angel (reviewed here) is definitely someone to keep an eye on. This one is worth checking out for Keener’s sense of Baba Yaga too, for sure.

Blood Of My Blood (Sangue Del Mio Sangue)

Vamp Light

Blood Of My Blood (Sangue Del Mio Sangue)
2015 Italy/France/Switzerland
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Seen at the London Film Festival October 9th 2015.

Warning: Light spoilers.

Marco Bellocchio’s new film, Blood Of My Blood, is one of the three films I picked out to see at the London Film Festival this year because the premise sounded intriguing. It also sounded very similar, in some respects, to a movie called The Witches’ Sabbath which has been languishing in my ‘to watch’ pile of DVDs for almost a year now. Which, bizarrely, I found out on the IMDB the day after I watched Blood Of My Blood, is also by this same director... a man whose work I have not seen before. Must be something in my subconscious picked this one out of this year’s programme to apply for the tickets, I reckon.

This movie is interesting in that it’s a film of two definitive halves, both set in the small town of Bobbio but in two different time periods. One section set historically at a time where suspected witches were being tortured for confessions by various monks in their monasteries and then flipping over to the present day halfway through the movie. The main lead actor, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio who plays Federico, is also the producer and son of the director and, like a few people in this movie, he has a dual role playing a character and then, later, a different person in contemporary times... presumably an ancestor of the one he played in the first part.

The plot involves a beautiful actress called Lidiya Liberman, in her debut role, playing Benedetta, a woman who the monks need to confess to consorting with Satan to allow Federico’s twin brother to be buried properly, rather than as a suicide which goes against God. In order for that to happen, they have to prove that he was not in sound mind and committing the action of his own free will and so... they need to torture a confession out of Benedetta.

The first half of the movie is Federico going from hatred to love of Benedetta as she undergoes fairly common witchcraft style trials such as the “if she floats she’s guilty” variety and, surprisingly, passing them all until she gets to a point where a kind of compromise is reached and she is, rather than burnt, walled alive into a tiny cubicle.

When we jump to the present day, we follow the upset caused by a Russian businessman who wants to buy the building in which Benedetta was walled up in and the current owner, an old vampire from a secret society of vampires, who wants to block this from happening but isn’t really in a position to. There are echoes from the past as he goes about his business and spies a new waitress in town who is the dead spit of Benedetta. Is she an ancestor? Well probably not as a nice revelation scene about her nature takes place in flashback towards the end of the movie... but I won’t spoil that moment for you here.

There are also some nice comedy moments, during the first half especially, where Federico introduces the two women he is staying with while he is visiting the monks, to the fanning of their sexual curiosity and awakening of their desires... which Federico is able to kindle and satisfy in one hit. He does tend to put it about a bit in his earlier incarnation, it has to be said.

Now there’s an interesting thing about the camerawork on this one, I noticed. Specifically, a lot of the shots in the first half of the film seem to be pitched from a point of view either slightly below or slightly above a ‘square on’ view. Not everything in the first half of the movie is shot like this but a lot of it seemed to be and that means that you are always either looking slightly down or slightly up at the characters as they come into view. This is bolstered by the odd extreme shot taken from either a greater height, such as the top of a staircase looking down at a door (something which is used a few times in the first part of the movie and again in the contemporary section of the film) or a shot from well below the view of the particular subject matter of a sequence. The latter is best demonstrated in a really interesting view point as when Benedetta is being thrown into a river loaded down with chains... the camera views her atop a cliff from under the water as a blur, later returning to this point of view as her body drops and breaks the surface of the water. There are definitely some nice things being done with the cinematography on this one.

The musical score by Carlo Crivelli is mostly appropriate and tasteful (asides from a few overtly comically scored moments, perhaps) but at a few points a couple of songs by ‘Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ are used and one of them, in the same sequence as the trial by water I described earlier, starting up when Benedetta is weighted down at the bottom of the lake, is Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Now I don’t know why the director and producers chose this but it popped me straight out of the movie for two reasons... other than for being a truly beautiful and haunting piece of music in its own right (which I guess means I’ve maybe answered my own question as to why it was chosen, to some respect). One reason is because it’s almost a more modern sound and doesn’t feel contemporary to the period it’s supporting. Now this is not a new thing and is, actually, a very common practice of musical anachronism found in more films than you might expect. To be fair, it’s not being used as ‘source music’... but I just find that when songs with vocalised lyrics are used that it tends to ‘break the spell’ of the illusion of the movie much more than if it was a purely instrumental piece. This is not what I would expect from the period in which this portion of the film is set.

Secondly, it’s already a piece of music I associate with both cinema and vampirism, being as it’s used to very good effect on the 2010 German vampire movie We Are The Night, reviewed here. So I don’t know if this was chosen to maybe evoke the idea of vampirism into the subtext of the movie before the overt introduction of one in the second part of the story but, much as I love this particular piece of music, I suspect this would have been much better off serving as purely a temp track in the rough cut for a new piece of score rather than being used outright in the movie. Of course, for people who are unfamiliar with We Are The Night or, indeed, the music group in question, then this may not have the same effect on certain members of the audience. I’m not in a position to be able to guess at that one.

All in all, Blood Of My Blood is a pretty good movie. It doesn’t spoon feed the audience and it leaves little puzzles and mysteries of the characters to play out in the mind after the movie is done. For me, for instance, a scene involving the throwing of a second cloister key onto the river bed may be concealing more interesting truths about the two characters than my brain was divulging to me on this first viewing. This is always a good thing but I’m not sure, to be honest, if this is a film I’d want to watch again. It is, however, a bit of a rare gem and the performances of the actors and the great, almost larger than life characters they conjure up here, are quite watchable and interesting. Most people should have a fairly good time with this movie, I think. Not exactly unmissable but certainly a rewarding film if you have the time and if, indeed, it gets any kind of release in this country at some point.

Outcast

World Of Witchcraft

Outcast
Ireland/UK 2010
Directed by Colm McCarthy
Momentum Region 2

Warning: A few spoilers but nothing too major.

This is a nice little find. I’d not heard of this movie before I read about it in a book the other week, but I’m really glad I ordered myself a cheap copy off of Amazon.

Set in a depressed, council estate in Edinburgh, a woman and her adolescent son rent a very run down, delapidated, 10 notches below ‘fixer upper’ of a flat and it doesn’t take you long to notice that there’s something a little odd about these two. Once they are in, for example, the mother paints strange symbols on the walls and it doesn’t take much to figure out that a) these two are on the run from someone (or something) and b) the mother is a witch and her son is... aha. I’ll not get ahead of myself there.

With these symbols ‘protecting them’ in their new home, the flat itself seems to be cloaked from anyone meaning the two of them harm. This is amply demonstrated (or should that be ‘demon-strated’) by the fact that the lady from ‘housing’ cannot find where these two live, even when she is standing outside their very door. Something stops her from recognising the flat, even though she has the number written down for her.

This little scene itself is used to impress upon the minds of the audience that the mother, Mary, played brilliantly by Kate Dickie, is actually a fairly potent witch and that she’s best not crossed. Something which becomes very clear when she goes out to talk to the same lady a little later in the film and puts a curse on her so that she wanders around the council estate forever, not knowing why she’s there. She can hold her own against her ‘own kind’ pretty well too... as seen in a few scenes scattered throughout the movie.

This low budget, UK witch movie exudes a kind of raw style which makes for a very rewarding watch. The two are being pursued by the boy’s father,  who is tattooed early on in the film with special symbols which give him “witched up” supernatural powers of his own to aid him in his hunt. There’s a nice scene where he cuts open a bird and follows the way the blood is pointing... and another where he basically has a mentally projected battle of wills with Mary from afar... similar to the kinds of things you used to see in the old Dr. Strange comics in the sixties. Mary once again proves her worth as a witch... and the fact that when she’s getting especially witchy that she also gets a bit naked might also interest a certain percentage of the viewers.

Meanwhile, her son is busy falling in love with the girl in the flat next door and all this is happening against a backdrop of gory murders in the area. There are quite a few little British character actors in this, including the inimitable James Cosmo as a kind of local ‘witch godfather’ (I still remember him best in Brond and also as Jock in the 70s Dick Barton TV serial... good times) and a small appearance by a certain female who had just gotten famous by the time this film was released...

Come along Pond!

Yes, I was actually gobsmacked when I noticed a friend of the neighbour was played by Doctor Who companion Karen Gillan. She is only in two brief scenes, with only a few lines before she’s dragged off and ripped apart by... well I won’t say by ‘who’, but if you’ve seen the cover of the UK DVD box then you’ll have a pretty good idea of ‘what’. There’s a ‘not badly done’ beastie in this movie and if you’ve been paying attention to the story in the film, it won’t take you very long to figure out who this beastie is when they’re not being a beastie... although I won’t say who it is here. To be honest, there’s a lot of deliberate misdirection in this film to kind of hide the identity of this particular ‘outcast’... but ultimately this doesn’t really succeed in blinding the audience to the inevitability of the identity of the movie’s central monster.

But that’s only a small fault and it would be a shame to judge the entire film by this because, frankly, it’s a well crafted, reasonably intelligent, British horror movie and deserves to find its audience. If the Hellblaiser comics had been done properly instead of having the basic character changed and too much money thrown at it (like it did with the Constantine movie, which was an enjoyable but hugely inaccurate adaptation of the source material) then I’d expect it to turn out a little more like this movie here. It’s probably the lack of budget which really helps this movie stay focussed on the function it’s trying to perform in the script, is my guess, and it certainly lends it a certain charm and reigns it in when a bit of money thrown at the odd scene or two might have actually harmed the uneasy feeling of authenticity it manages to carry off  at certain points too. The creature looks a little less sophisticated than it might be in a Hollywood project, for instance, but that too is really not bad and I much preferred it to some of the terrible, over-used CGI rubbish we’ve been getting over the years.

The film is competently shot and edited and has absolutely brilliant performances, as you’d expect from a lot of the “haven’t-I-seen-him/her-before?” character actors who turn up in this one. A really good watch if your in the mood for a modern day story of witches and monsters which doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator audience and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Worth a watch by pretty much anybody, but especially if you have a passion for this kind of modern spin on a Dennis Wheatley vibe. Don’t let this one get away from you.