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You Won't Be Alone (2022) is a film that plays with genre and gender simultaneously, never allowing the audience to feel comfortable in one body or with a one familiar trope. In contrast to many of the films that fall under the folk horror umbrella, it asks its audience to examine our deep-rooted fears rather than allowing us to be mindlessly drawn into a superstitious frenzy over the existence of the 'Other', achieved by a subjective voice that muddies the line between good and evil, between victim and predator, between man and woman. Rather than the good 'normal' people being corrupted by a cult or satanists, we are encouraged to identify with someone who is doing harm, trapped in liminal chaos and seemingly finding liberation by accident, after many failed attempts to assimilate and find community.

Nevena, the protagonist of the story, is and remains an oddity to those around her, shifting between bodies, often without meaning to, as a way to learn about the world. Living most her life in a cave, her only guidance for this journey is Old Maid Maria, a vindictive witch who seeks to teach her surrogate daughter about the true nature of the world, asserting cruelty and stepping in when things appear to be going too well for her.

The legacy of witches is an inherently gendered one. It cannot be separated from its stereotypes and from the inherent fear of aberrational women. By extension, witches are often described as failed, wayward women, transgressing the bounds of patriarchy, intentionally flouting the rules of womanhood or worse, having their womanhood stripped from them by way of caricatures. They are grotesque. They are a danger to your children. They will harm you if you venture too deep into the woods.

Maria is such a legend, feared by those around her for her infringement on hegemony, particularly when it comes to her cannibalism, which we discover is key to her transformation into different people and animals. In a different film, this depiction would be the end of our sympathy for this character. Her disobedience and her intentional corruption of Nevena would be confirmation of all that we have come to know about witches, about gender non-conformity and about the right way to be in the world.

You Won't Be Alone is not so simple. What Maria seeks to show Nevena is the way that gender encompasses and, more importantly, confines the human experience. Where Nevena is able to explore the way gender functions differently in the world, Maria is marred by her experience as a woman forced into marriage and left to find solace in witchcraft, a way of life she appears to resent as it lead to her being attacked and ostracised further. In her own twisted way, Maria shields Nevena from this exploitation by marking her for corruption herself, beating fate to the punch and teaching her a lesson about patriarchy before the world has a chance to. She exists as evidence of the consequences of gendered violence and her anger is never quelled. She doesn't see the joy in gender fluidity as Nevena does, seeking to sabotage her at every turn, almost as a way to validate her own feelings of shame and rage. Why should Nevena enjoy the freedom she was never able to obtain?

Having lived in a cave for most of her life, Nevena is not yet debilitated by the brutality of the world; a clean slate uninhibited by gendered expectations and prejudice. This doesn't mean the film is coy about the stark difference between the binary available to her. In her different bodies, Nevena can only assimilate through imitation and she does this without the knowledge that there will be consequences for her failure to do this perfectly.

At the beginning of the film, it can be said that she has the purest conception of gender fluidity because, having been cut off from a gendered world, she has no concept of why experimentation with one's identity is a bad thing. It's only through mockery, harassment and a general intolerance to difference that this innocence is trained out of her. Nevena experiences this over several lifetimes, with varying levels of consequence, but always feeling the loss of joy that comes with the realisation that people are hostile to difference in a very visceral way. The consequences often manifest in the death of the person she is to inhabit, having to steal away their lives to escape the threat of domestic violence, rape or murder. The film emphasises the weight of non-conformity and throughout, the horror of the film comes with matter-of-fact nature of this kind of hatred.

The body and (more implicitly) bodily autonomy are at the centre of this film. We see the ways that other people's bodies are used, quite ironically, to free Nevena from her life of solitude, in turn robbing those people of the lives they could have lived. The film asks its audience to question the certainty of freedom when it comes to simply existing in a body, something that is magnified when Nevena has to be a woman. At the same time, it remains malleable in how it allows the main character to present herself, varying the extent she assimilates within the communities she encounters.

As the film goes on and she acquires more and more knowledge about what it means to be a person, she is more adept in what she wants, seeking sexual freedom, marriage and emancipation from Maria, who entrapped her in the first place. In playing with the bounds of gender, Nevena comes to realise the value of having a body in the first place, that when she is consuming the organs of beings she will take the shape of, they are not disposable slabs of meat, but people. It is not just a means for power, or done out spite and rage like Maria, but an act that has weight and more importantly, consequences.

By showing the contrast between Maria and Nevena, we are given a film that is interrogating a generational divide whilst also allowing space for the pain that comes with having lived a deeply traumatic life. It mourns the relationship between these two characters that can never be, because of how they have and haven't been confined by gender. Maria is always so close to understanding what Nevena enjoys about shifting between identities but never reaches a place where she sees it as anything other than a violent burden. She functions as a tragic image of the past, constantly fighting a losing battle against the future that speeding towards her, body by body.