[imagesource: Focus Features / You Won’t Be Alone]

This masterful tale debuting at the Sundance Film Festival takes us to an isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia.

The film follows a witch, who was once a girl, kidnapped and transformed by an ancient spirit, as she takes on her victims’ shape to live life in their skin and discover what it is to be human.

You Won’t Be Alone, a fascinating journey of life in the bodies of others, is “an ingenious vessel to make profound observations on gender, sex and being,” notes The Guardian, who has given the “one-of-a-kind” debut five stars.

Visionary director Goran Stolevski’s “Magnus opus” is powerful in its exploration of being “in awe of nature while weighed down by a mounting disappointment in humanity”.

The international cast is showered with praise with Swedish Noomi Rapace, Australian Alice Englert, Portuguese Carloto Cotta, and Macedonian Sara Klimoska all acting as a new body.

While the film is also a deep dive into the discomfort and sacrifice that women endure in the patriarchy, “the film is not steeped in oppressive darkness”.

Rather, Stolevski focuses on the small things in a world that many are told contains no joy:

As a writer, he’s capable of remarkable insight and empathy, shown most effectively in the late-stage reveal of a harrowing backstory for the wolf-eateress, a woman destroyed by male expectation and judgment.

His film toys with fairy tale fantasy and gruesome body horror – there are plenty of torn innards on display – but he has ultimately created something indefinable, gloriously so, like nothing we’ve really ever seen before and like nothing we’re likely to see again.

You Won’t Be Alone is currently debuting at Sundance and will hit UK cinemas from April 1.

Check out the trailer:

For this creative horror, the wait appears to be worth it.

[source:guardian]