[Fantasia 2020 Review] Alone is an Intense Survival Thriller with a Fantastic Finale

I never knew I’d have the entire movie spoiled through reading a plot synopsis like I did with this film. It’s weird, but the willingness to dole out the entirety of the plot of John Hyams’ Alone is probably the biggest detriment to the movie because it’s such a streamlined film. It’s a story of survival, stripped of most of the expositional or character-development beats and elements, whittled down to the barest of essentials. In this regard, it reminds me of some of the French thrillers I’d watch in the mid 00s where the action is taut and the storytelling minimal.

The closest example I can think of is the way Alexandre Aja filmed Haute Tension, with its razor-focus on constantly ratcheting the tension and upping the ante, scene by scene. In some ways, this foreign connection is appropriate since Alone is based on a Swedish film from 2011 called Gone, which was written and directed by Mattias Olsson (who also wrote Alone’s script). And while this doesn’t rely on gratuitous violence in the same way that a film like Haute Tension or other films of the New French Extremity thrived on, the simple premise and stripped back cast gives the film a similar and propulsive pace. 

Unlike the synopses floating around the internet, I won’t dwell on the plot. Jessica (Jules Willcox) has just packed up her entire life in the back of a moving truck. While at a stoplight with her past looming in the background, she pauses for a solitary moment to reflect. It’s a relatively unimportant character beat in relation to the film but it hints at an immense sadness. Whatever she’s leaving, it’s obviously still has a hold on her.

Her travels take her through a mountainous and lonely section of the Pacific Northwest, an area covered in immense trees with roads that skirt between rocky outcroppings and raging rivers, with only a small guard rail for protection. She passes the time listening to audiobooks and calls her father to tell him she left early to avoid seeing her mother. While there’s an uncertain feeling of tension throughout these early moments, it begins to bubble when she’s stuck behind a Jeep moving incredibly slowly on a two-way stretch of highway. When it’s obvious he has no intention of speeding up, she tries to pass him and he immediately speeds up, keeping time with her until she almost has a head-on collision with a truck.  

After this perilous moment, the Jeep starts to follow her, flashing its lights and honking its horn at her in apparent anger. And then Jessica keeps seeing the Jeep, almost as if it’s stalking her. It follows her through the winding mountain passes and that night it does a slow drive-by while she gets gas in the lonely dark. Then it shows up the next morning at the hotel she stayed in. And even though Jessica does all the right things and tries to elude this Man (Marc Menchaca), he has his eye on her and soon she will be forced to fight for her life. 

Alone is broken up into chapters that kind of create a situation for Jessica to navigate or deal with. The first is unsurprisingly called The Road and is a perfect little exercise in elevating tension. Coming from this year’s The Outsider, Menchaca first comes across as a man who straddles the thin, almost non-existent line between being that clueless man who doesn’t realize he’s being antagonistic…and that stalkery villain who knows exactly what he’s doing. While the screenwriter is a man, Alone smartly explores just how fraught with danger the world is for a woman driving alone on a solitary, mountain road and Jules Willcox embodies that feeling perfectly. She’s a strong and smart character who immediately knows this Man is bad news, but no matter what she does she can’t quite escape him. I really appreciated how resourceful she becomes as Jessica is forced to navigate seemingly inescapable situations and she’s never portrayed as a victim; just a survivor. The film rightly puts us in her shoes and Willcox’s performance is the right mix of bravado and terror that feels authentic and had me questioning how (or if) she’d escape. 

Without spoiling too much, the film is as much woman versus man as it is woman versus nature and cinematographer Federico Verardi beautifully frames the action against the cold and ominous forest setting. Even in the less wooded areas, the film manages to sustain tension with some interesting camera tricks. One particular shot of Jessica at a rest stop uses forced perspectives, alternating between blurring the background behind her then blurring he, as an effective scene-setter that forces you to create the tension yourself, as you scour the backgrounds looking for telltale signs of incoming horror. And a sequence set on and in a raging rapids is a phenomenal bit of survival horror that has a chilling, if predictable, line of dialogue attached.

What’s not predictable, though, is the way the final confrontation unfolds. While Alone is most about building a kind of tension that relies more on the threat of violence rather than actual violence, when the violence happens it is scrappy and nondescript in its savagery. Vicious knife stabs and crunchy tire iron smashes really hit and a sequence involving a slender branch had me squirming. A set piece near the finale, meanwhile, had me screaming in joyous rage as our heroine is forced to fight in claustrophobic and tight spaces. I love when a movie isn’t afraid of putting its characters through the wringer and Alone succeeds in crafting some spectacular sequences.

The two characters are broadly drawn, but it doesn’t matter, because the two actors infuse their performances with so much individuality. While I could have done without the threat of sexual assault that seems to be the go-to violence of choice against women in movies, I’m glad that the film ultimately skirts it and focuses more on the battle of survival. It’s such an insignificant moment of threat that’s never needed in this kind of film and Alone works best when it’s focused on themes of survival. And after 90 minutes of cat-and-mouse survivalism, Alone builds to such a thrilling finale, it left me as breathless and exhausted as the characters.