Tag Archives: Noomi Rapace

‘You Won’t Be Alone’ Explores What It Means To Be Human

In 2022, writer and director Goran Stolevski broke into the horror space with his feature film debut, You Won’t Be Alone. A dark fantasy period piece, the film takes place in an isolated mountain village tucked away in 19th century Macedonia. It’s a fascinating and singular Uterus Horror film. A sheltered teenage girl is given great power, then left to experience the world for the first time all alone.

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Maria (Anamaria Marinca) is an infamous witch known as the “Wolf-Eatress.” When she slips into a home to take a newborn baby, Nevena, the baby’s mother (Sofija Jeremić) makes a panicked deal. If Maria will spare the baby now, the mother promises to give her to the witch once the child turns 16. Maria agrees, but not before taking the infant’s voice. In an effort to trick the witch, Nevena’s mother hides her away in a cave. There, Nevena is raised in complete isolation, having no interaction with (or knowledge of) the outside world, except for her mother’s visits. 

The mother thinks she’s outsmarted Maria, but Maria is far too cunning. On the day Nevena (Sara Klimoska) turns 16, Maria kills the mother and assumes her form. Disguised, Maria goes to Nevena and frees her from the cave before performing a rare spell that makes Nevena a witch as well. Nevena is now armed with retractable black talons and all of Maria’s magical abilities. Maria returns to her true form and begins to teach Nevena how to use her new power. Witches gain their power through blood. Maria tries to teach Nevena to hunt and kill animals so she can drink their blood for power, but Nevena’s childlike sense of wonder makes her simply want to play with the animals. Enraged, Maria abandons Nevena, killing a wolf and putting its entrails in her chest to assume the wolf’s form. Thus begins Nevena’s journey into the unknown.

Curiosity eventually leads Nevena to a nearby village. While spying on the inhabitants, Nevena accidentally kills a young mother named Bosilka (Noomi Rapace). Confused and distraught by her actions, Nevena puts the woman’s entrails in her own chest and assumes her form. The rest of the village take Bosilka’s newfound silence and confusion in stride, assuming perhaps she has gone mad. While Nevena has assumed Bosilka’s form and is living her life, everything is still new to the young witch.

As Bosilka, with the help of the other women in the village, Nevena learns basic skills such as cooking and cleaning, even learning to at least vaguely communicate without speech. She also notices how differently she is treated by men and women while in this body. Bosilka’s brute of a husband roughly tries to have sex with his wife. Since this is an act Nevena has no knowledge or understanding of, she panics and kills the man. Realizing she can’t stay in the village any longer, Nevena removes Bosilka’s entrails from her chest, assuming her true form, and flees.

The next form Nevena takes is that of a young man named Boris (Carloto Cotta), whom she kills before placing his entrails in her chest. While in this body, Nevena is introduced to an entirely different way of life and new skills. With her continued childlike disposition, she learns how to do manual labor such as working crop fields. The change in Boris’s behavior does lead to the village women attempting an exorcism on him, but they believe it is successful, and Nevena returns to a routine. She also experiences her first instance of sexual pleasure, sleeping with a girl while in Boris’s form, which is quite a contrast to her experience as Bosilka. Nevena could have continued happily in this life, but then she finds Biliana (Anastasija Karanovich). A little girl who has fallen from a cliff, Biliana forces Nevena to experience sadness and grief for the first time. Unsure of what to do with this new feeling and not wanting the child to die, Nevena takes the form of Biliana.

Biliana is Nevena’s chance to have a normal life. She re-integrates into Boris’s village as this little girl. She is cared for and taught the way she should have been as a child. Nevena is finally able to have a normal life, despite her lack of voice and hidden powers. Then, You Won’t Be Alone moves to adulthood in the form of Biliana (Alice Englert). Nevena marries a boy she grew up with and lives a happy life. While pregnant with her first child, Nevena’s husband is killed by a boar that was likely Maria in disguise. Not long after Nevena gives birth to her daughter, Maria appears. Maria uses her talon to cut the baby girl’s throat, forcing Nevena to perform the spell to turn her baby into a witch, saving its life.

You Won’t Be Alone tells a compelling Uterus Horror story in two different ways. The first, and most obvious, is in Nevena’s journey, which begins on her 16th birthday. This is significant in that she would likely have gone through puberty and in many cultures, especially at that time, 16 is the age a girl becomes a woman. It’s also significant because, up until that day, she had never interacted with the outside world. She experiences many things for the first time, but Nevena is given the unique opportunity to experience life from different points of view. 

Her witch powers give her the chance to experience life as a wife and mother, doing the cooking, cleaning, and child caring, but also being viewed as property by men. Her powers then allow her to experience life as a man, learning how to grow and care for crops while having more freedom. When Nevena finally takes the form of Biliana, she has chosen the life she wants to live, while also getting the chance to have the childhood she never had. Nevena takes the form and the life that feels the most authentically her, an ability and understanding some people never find.

The second way You Won’t Be Alone tells a compelling Uterus Horror story is in the juxtaposition of Nevena and Maria. We learn in the film that Maria had a terrible life. She was worked, tricked, sexually assaulted, left ill, and eventually burned alive before becoming a witch. The world was unkind to Maria, so as a witch she became hateful toward humans. Nevena’s sheltered upbringing gave her a very different point of view. She was a witch before she experienced the human world. It allowed her to take on different forms and see the many different sides of humanity. 

Maria hates and fears humans because of how she was treated as a human, which made her a malevolent witch. Nevena loves humans because she experienced life for the first time as a witch and more easily assimilated to human life, making her choose a contented human life. In showing the parallel paths for these two characters, You Won’t Be Alone conveys how much of the human experience boils down to the treatment of others. One can only wonder which side of the coin Nevena’s baby will land on.

More Than Human: The Monstrous Women of ‘Alien’ and ‘Annihilation’

When women in horror come of age, they experience a unique rite-of-passage. The onset of puberty has a storied history in the genre; in Carrie and Ginger Snaps, newly-discovered power arrives with the first menstrual cycle for both protagonists. The ability to birth children in Rosemary’s Baby finds its lead pregnant with the antichrist and in The Fly, Veronica (Geena Davis) carries a half-insectoid fetus to term. Once women cross that boundary into adulthood, they venture off the map of normal human existence. When women become capable of mothering, they deviate from the bodily norm. They become monsters.

“When a woman is presented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions,” writes horror scholar Barbara Creed. What awaits those same women, evolving from monstrous origins, as they grow older? They disrupt social boundaries. They antagonise the troublesome concept of a “default” human experience, a rebellion which occurs in cinema without their consent.

Sigourney Weaver and Alien

The Alien franchise, which began with Ridley Scott‘s 1979 film Alien, makes no bones about its ambition to accomplish that same goal (albeit from a different starting point). Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon has described his film as “payback” for the wave of early 1970s rape-revenge movies, one where men live in fear of being penetrated. The facehugger clings to Kane’s face against his will, forcing its proboscis down his throat, implanting an alien egg which gestates inside his body until it cracks through muscle, ribs, to emerge as a chestburster. This unorthodox approach to reproduction—and to birth—through human violation threads the franchise. The point made is explicit.

“I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs,” O’Bannon once explained in The Alien Saga. But as the franchise progressed, O’Bannon’s self-styled attack on men fell flat. This tactic, an attempt at horror equity, changes later in the series, as if no new terrain exists and the only place left for women to occupy is that of a monstrous mother. 

In subsequent films, something more terrifying takes command of its women. No longer on the cusp of adulthood, women are broken down and remade into new, more transgressive monsters that only permit certain functions. Ellen Ripley‘s (Sigourney Weaver) death at the end of Alien 3 feels inevitable—she isn’t an active mother, not to her biological child who died on Earth or her adoptive one, Newt, who drowned in her sleep. Without the ability to perform that function, she is redundant. The only way she’s brought back is to become the literal mother to a monster in Alien: Resurrection. Ripley’s death is a choice snatched from her when the US government—can’t even blame it on a shady corporation anymore—clones Ripley to get its hands on the alien queen embryo nuzzled in her chest.

Not only is Ripley resurrected against her consent—revoking even her agency to stay dead—she’s forced into the role of mother against her will. Ripley 2.0 might be stronger and have acid blood now she’s enmeshed with the xenomorph’s DNA, but make no mistake: she depicts an inhuman mother to an inhumane thing. She’s a mother to the alien xenomorph and the alien xenomorph’s offspring. 

Ripley’s journey at this point is remarkable. Having transgressed the final boundary humans will ever experience, she’s yanked back to life, an unwilling participant in an experiment to remake the alien. Given her repeated attempts to kill this thing, she’s denied the peace of finality—instead, she is also remade, again and again, in the government’s attempt to clone her and the creature. Midway through the film, Ripley discovers seven deformed versions of herself—half-human, half-alien—in an emotional scene. Most are dead, suspended in liquid. One remains alive, a xenomorph-human wearing Ripley’s face, who begs Ripley 2.0 to kill her. A mere taste of the abject horror that awaits her successor.

Noomi Rapace and Prometheus

The character of Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) in Scott’s prequel films, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, is subject to the same treatment—and the same disregard over her inability to reproduce. “I can’t create life,” she says to her partner, with whom she then immediately has sex, and whaddya know, creates life. But we’re not talking about a human life here: she’s violated as Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green) is unknowingly infected by a black antigen. Now she is pregnant, but with a creature that threatens her life, which she then has to surgically remove. Her offspring known as the Trilobite facehugs an Engineer and creates an ancestor of the Xenomorph. In essence, Shaw—like Ripley—is mother to a monster. 

And her reward, once she’s fulfilled that prerequisite? She’s killed by android David (Michael Fassbender) as part of his misbegotten plan to create life. The savagery—the brutality of what he does—extends far past the need to kill her for organ harvesting, but he attempts to make her “more than human, evolved.” The results are glimpsed in deleted scenes featuring a truly horrific transformation of Shaw: sliced open, bones protruding from her temple, chest split clean, alien biology supplanting her fragile human frame. David fails to keep her alive, but the gruesome experiments with her remains lead to the creation of the xenomorph.

The system by which the Alien women are all treated is a cycle. David creates the alien through violating Shaw, the progeny of that creature attacks Kane, and journeys alongside Ripley, eventually becoming a part of her biology as it began with Shaw. Elizabeth, unwillingly, becomes a monstrous mother to Ellen.

The Women of Annihilation

The women of Annihilation, Alex Garland‘s 2018 film, experience the same treatment by an alien power. After a meteor hits a lighthouse located in a Florida state park—its impact unleashing a paranormal, biological change upon the swamp landscape—a group of five women scientists enter the surrounding area. An opalescent, impossible light coats the terrain; this is a space known as The Shimmer, where time refuses to obey laws and the fundamental tenets of science crumble. 

The team we follow are aware of The Shimmer’s effects; except for one person, none of the previous crews who ventured into the zone returned. The women, Lena (Natalie Portman), Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Cass (Tuva Novotny), Josie (Tessa Thompson), and Anya (Gina Rodriguez), enter it willingly. Granted, they’re one of dozens of missions into The Shimmer, but the film charts this specific expedition. They’re all broken women. They no longer possess attributes associated with being a woman. No longer are they mothers or wives. They’re the forgotten ones, shuffled to life’s periphery through infidelity, loss, disease, and isolation. All of these women are hopeless, unmoored from purpose and only too willing—as Ventress puts it—to “self-destruct.”

While inside The Shimmer, Lena notes that all plant and animal life is “stuck in a continuous mutation” which recycles all accessible nearby particles, be it physical or mental. Cass has the indignity and trauma of her dying moments mashed together with the creature that killed her. A terrifying sequence involves her killer—a mutated bear—stalking the remaining women, its reassembled self having assimilated Cass’s dying screams into its voice. “Help… me,” her voice cries, wrong in the bear’s throat. 

“Imagine dying frightened and in pain and having that as the only part of you which survives,” Josie comments in the aftermath. She recognises the entropy headed for all of them, a transgression into something unknowable before their inevitable ends. Josie is enveloped by nature, a humanoid flowering tree. Ventress flooded with light, snaps away like embers in the wind. 

Over the course of the film, these women are dismantled, ripped apart on a genetic level by an alien ecosystem, reforged against their wishes. Ventress’ final words before she bursts apart summarise the action within The Shimmer: “Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains…Annihilation.” 

As for Lena, a droplet of her blood spills into the mouth of the psychedelic swirl left by Ventress’ death. Out from the cyclone emerges a blank simulacra, a sinister doppelganger taunting Lena, later destroyed by a grenade.

Lena technically survives—as evidenced by the flashback sequences—but she’s not the human who first entered The Shimmer. It’s as if the only way to forge a path back to her marriage is by not being the original Lena, by being something else, some remixed version. The only way to “atone” for her infidelity, to return to Kane, who also is not himself, is through being annihilated, and rebuilt alien and monstrous. In the final scene, her husband asks, “Are you not Lena?” with a hopeful lilt to his tone. Maybe the real Lena might not have made her way back—instead, something else has come in her stead, something better suited to him.

Conclusion

Both groups of women, Ripley and Shaw from Alien and Lena’s group in Annihilation, become monstrous as a way to somehow address their failings as adult women. It’s as if once women reach a point, their first steps into monstrosity—the coming of a period, the having of a baby—telegraph more abjection to come. They make their way forward, onto fresh terrains, where the only thing waiting in adulthood is more monstrosity, whether they want it or not.

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