You Won’t Be Alone is what happens when someone watches a bunch of witch movies, stares at a Tarkovsky poster, remembers all their childhood existential dread, and says: “Okay, but what if a witch came-of-age story emotionally destroyed you instead of just jump-scaring you?”
Goran Stolevski’s feature debut is a dark, poetic, sometimes brutal little masterpiece that takes the witch archetype—crone, monster, baby-eater—and flips it into something feral, tender, and deeply human. It’s part folklore horror, part body-hopping art film, part “what if life actually is that confusing when you’ve never had one before?”
Think The Witch if instead of “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” the question was, “Wouldst thou like to live, screw up repeatedly, and slowly figure out what love is while occasionally eviscerating livestock?”
Wolf-Eateress, But Make It Emotional
First, we meet Maria the Wolf-Eateress (Anamaria Marinca), a witch whose whole aesthetic is “burned to death and then got back up about it.” She’s terrifying in the way wounded, bitter things are terrifying—which is the point.
She visits a newborn baby, Nevena, and makes a bargain with the mother: she’ll spare the child, but come for her at sixteen. It’s the folkloric version of a student loan. The mother, Elica, immediately tries to cheat the system by hiding Nevena in a cave for sixteen years.
Maria: I’ll come back.
Elica: You’ll forget.
Maria: I literally live in the woods drinking blood; I have nothing else to do.
Before she leaves, Maria takes Nevena’s voice, so the girl grows up mute, living in a tiny stone womb of overprotection and incomplete fairy tales about the outside world. 10/10 on symbolism, 0/10 on healthy parenting.
Witchcraft 101: Claws, Guts, and Absolutely No Manual
On Nevena’s sixteenth birthday, Maria returns—disguised as an eagle, because of course—and kills Elica off-screen before dragging Nevena out into the world. The witch “turning” ritual is classic Balkan nightmare fuel: kill a donkey, scratch open the chest, spit blood into the wound, burn it shut. Boom: retractable black talons, immortality, and a lifetime subscription to the “everyone will hate you” club.
Maria tries to break her in like a baby witch apprentice:
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Kill animals, drink blood, get strong.
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Avoid humans; they will hurt you.
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Shut up and obey, etc.
But Nevena isn’t playing along. She’s more fascinated by the world than by brutalizing it. She pets animals instead of slicing them. She stares at wind in the grass while Maria radiates “disappointed sports dad” energy in the background. Eventually, Maria loses patience, calls her useless, and bails.
Honestly, it’s kind of funny: ancient, feared witch adopts baby monster and then quits because the kid’s too soft. Parenting!
Life #1: Bosilka – Womanhood, Misery, and Laundry
Left alone and curious, Nevena spies on Maria shapeshifting into a wolf by stuffing its guts into her chest cavity. Witchcraft, in this universe, is basically “eat someone’s insides, wear them like a skinsuit.” It’s grotesque, tactile, and so viscerally weird it loops back around to sublime.
Nevena tries this with a young mother, Bosilka (Noomi Rapace), accidentally killing her in the process. Wearing Bosilka’s body like a secondhand coat, Nevena stumbles into village life with the social skills of a confused baby deer.
Watching her learn is equal parts adorable and tragic: she figures out how to wash clothes, cook, work in the fields, interact with other women, and interpret the strange codes of smiles, frowns, and side-eyes. The villagers assume Bosilka has gone crazy; we know she’s just literally never been alive before in this way.
The men treat “Bosilka” like property; her husband is rough, entitled, and terrifying in that mundane way that makes patriarchy more horrifying than any witch. In one brutal scene, sex with her husband turns into panic, and Nevena kills him in self-defense. It’s not a power fantasy—it’s the heartbreaking realization that in this shape, in this role, she was never safe.
She pulls Bosilka’s guts out, drops the disguise, and walks away. One life down. Many to go.
Life #2: Boris – Masculinity, Fields, and the Odd Joy of Being a Guy
Next, Nevena tries being a man. She takes the body of Boris (Carloto Cotta), a young villager, and is promptly tossed into the rhythms of 19th-century Macedonian manhood: ploughing fields, threshing grain, existing in a slightly wider cage.
As Boris, Nevena learns how men move, how they look at women, how they laugh with each other. Her childlike confusion makes him seem possessed, so the women of the village attempt an exorcism—with all the theological nuance of a sledgehammer. They think they’ve freed him from the Wolf-Eateress. Joke’s on them; the witch was already inside.
There’s dark humor in Boris’ clumsy attempts to blend in and in the way villagers rationalize it as spiritual interference instead of “this man has the psyche of a newborn cosmic creature.”
Nevena also experiences sex as a man, and it’s portrayed with a startling tenderness—a moment of shared joy and connection instead of pure power. It complicates everything we’ve seen: gender here becomes not just costume but a different angle on the same aching desire to be loved.
Life #3: Biliana – Childhood, Innocence, and Actual Emotional Devastation
When Nevena finds Biliana, a young girl dying from a fall, she’s devastated. For the first time, Nevena cries—raw, helpless grief for someone she hasn’t even met. She takes Biliana’s form, and for once, enters a life already loved.
As Biliana, Nevena gets what she never had: a family, gentle caretaking, grandmotherly stories, sibling-like teasing. She meets Jovan, a sweet boy who seems mute as well. Two quiet souls orbit each other, slowly forming the kind of wordless bond that feels like being understood without needing language.
We also get Maria’s origin story here, told as a fireside legend for children and a sucker punch for adults: a lonely “old maid” begging a witch for love, raped by a dying man to “continue his line,” accused of witchcraft, burned alive, and accidentally transformed into the very monster they feared.
Do we approve of Maria? No. Do we understand her? Uncomfortably, yes. She’s what happens when a woman’s pain curdles instead of heals.
Years pass. Biliana grows up (now played by Alice Englert), marries Jovan (Félix Maritaud), and experiences actual, real love. When Nevena reveals her claws, he doesn’t recoil. In a film full of butchery, that acceptance lands like a miracle.
Naturally, it cannot last. This is a witch story, not a Hallmark special.
Love, Loss, and Witch Motherhood
Jovan dies in a boar attack, heavily implied to be Maria’s doing. Nevena has finally built a life she wants, so of course the universe—by which I mean Maria—smashes it.
Nevena gives birth to a baby girl and becomes the one thing Maria will never be: a loving witch mother. Terrified Maria will hurt the baby, she hovers constantly, trying to protect her and, in the process, repeating some of Elica’s anxious mistakes.
One morning, she finds Maria with the child. There’s this chilling, awful little scene where Maria mocks the baby, then slits her throat with a talon, almost out of spite: “See? This is what love gets you.”
Nevena, in a frantic act of instinctual magic, uses her one allowable witch spell to turn her daughter into a witch and save her. It’s the ultimate inversion of Maria’s experience: instead of pain birthing bitterness, pain births more life.
And something breaks in Maria. Watching Nevena choose love over fear, again and again, she cracks. She admits her jealousy, her rage at Nevena’s ability to remain human where she couldn’t. It’s messy, tearful, ugly—two monsters arguing over what might have been.
Nevena kills Maria not out of vengeance, but out of exhausted mercy. As Maria dies, Nevena remembers every life she’s lived, every body, every lesson. It’s not a victorious moment. It’s quiet, mournful, and utterly devastating.
Witches, But Make Them Human
What makes You Won’t Be Alone so good is that it’s never really about magic. The claws, entrails, shapeshifting—yes, they’re memorable, gross, and uniquely done, but they’re tools. The real horror (and beauty) is in the lives Nevena inhabits, the way she slowly pieces together what it means to be human:
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As Bosilka, she learns the cruelties and confines of womanhood.
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As Boris, she sees the quiet loneliness behind masculine privilege.
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As Biliana, she discovers childhood, family, and love.
Witchcraft here isn’t just power—it’s the ability to cross boundaries, to live many lives and realize that under the skin, everyone is just stumbling around in pain and longing, hoping it’ll matter to someone.
The dark humor comes from how much of horror is just… regular life, slightly turned: villagers blaming demons for bad behavior, men sulking about “bewitchment” instead of their own stupidity, a centuries-old witch sulking like a jealous older sister because her apprentice likes humans too much.
Final Verdict: A Haunting Fairy Tale with Teeth
You Won’t Be Alone is not a movie you throw on casually. It’s slow, lyrical, violent, and deeply sad—but it’s also strangely hopeful. It suggests that even in a world of blood and fire and cruelty, someone can still choose tenderness. Again. And again. And again.
If you want jump scares, this isn’t it. If you want a folk-horror poem about bodies, souls, and the terrifying project of being alive, this is your witchy, gut-filled, heart-shredding jam.
Just… maybe don’t eat anything spaghetti-like during the shapeshifting scenes.
