You Won't Be Alone

Amidst a sea of horror films that rely purely on atmospherics and extravagant visual flexing, here's someone who's come to tell an affecting story as much as provide an experience. A witch with shape-shifting abilities that let her transform into another being on consuming their organs, holds a newborn captive and has her grow up in a feral manner in the woods. The film is about the journey of this now mute girl who has to learn about the world outside with her ability to shape-shift through various bodies.

It's rewarding to watch a horror film dismantling tropes and work with a grammar that's far drawn out from the genre. Most of the film is handheld, there's no hero shot for the supernatural element. The overall treatment is all-too grounded. There's a tendency to cutaway from capturing reactions to the one causing them. The story is designed to humanise an age-old element of horror and disgust, and uses quite a few devices to aide this inversion. We get the tragic backstory to the witch, a folktale that essentially speaks of ostracization through an origin story. It's effective because of the sheer brutality unleashed by the society on a character whose motives were quite humane, fair.