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Palm Tree

Review :  ‘You Won’t Be Alone’

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Palm Tree

Maybe it’s a counter-reaction to our increasingly digital reality, but lately horror films have increasingly turned to primal pasts to resurrect the rituals and fears of folktale.

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Palm Tree

It’s a strikingly global trend, spanning puritan New England (“The Witch”), rural Iceland (“Lamb”), North Dublin (“You Are Not My Mother”) and pagan cults of Sweden (“Midsommar”). The best of these movies don’t just dredge up a supernatural force from another time but adapt the spirit and psychology that it emerged out of.

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Palm Tree

Goran Stolevski is an Australian writer-director but he was born and raised in Macedonia.

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Palm Tree

And in his feature-film debut, “You Won’t Be Alone,” he has drawn from old regional witch tales to craft a spell-binding immersion in a distant and fantastical 19th century Macedonian realm that nevertheless throbs with a strange, timeless existentialism. If you are picturing broomsticks, don’t. We aren’t in Kansas anymore.

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Palm Tree

“You Won’t Be Alone,” which debuts in theaters Friday, begins with a visit from a 200-year-old witch .

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Palm Tree

She’s known as Old Maid Maria or as the Wolf-Eateress, and her face is pock-marked from the fire that wouldn’t consume her.

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Palm Tree

She has come for a peasant woman’s infant daughter, Nevena. The mother pleads to let her raise the child until she’s 16, a bargain that Maria strikes by cutting the child’s tongue out.

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Palm Tree

After trying to hide Nevena all her life in a cave with a natural skylight high above, Maria comes for her, arriving in the form of a crow.

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Palm Tree

Life through a witch’s eyes in ‘You Won’t Be Alone’