Pity the audiences who confuse Alone the movie with Alone the reality television show, beautifully reviewed by J. Oliver Conroy in a recent issue of this magazine. While both productions explore the perils of wilderness survival, the new film by John Hyams offers a far darker vision of what we have to fear in the woods.
As austere as its primeval setting, Alone wastes little time thrusting its main character into danger. Jessica (Jules Willcox) is a grieving widow who sets out across the country for a new life in the Pacific Northwest. Her antagonist (Marc Menchaca, credited as The Man) is a serial kidnapper whose modus operandi involves ensnaring women on the open road. When a near collision brings Jessica to the man’s attention, he contrives a series of encounters that culminate in her abduction to a backwoods cabin. There, Jessica must brave not only the surrounding forest but the violent intentions of her captor, as well.
For the first third of its 98-minute run time, Alone is a case study in the filmmaking of dread. Having given viewers almost nothing in the way of backstory, Hyams focuses instead on the way fear evolves in real time. The movie’s initial scare, an impeccably photographed driving debacle, does much to establish an undercurrent of menace. (The man goads Jessica into passing him; an oncoming 18-wheeler nearly kills her.) Even better is an understated scene at a rest stop after Jessica realizes she’s being followed. As our heroine talks nervously on a telephone, the camera lingers on every stranger and car in the area, a simulation of the paranoia with which a woman under threat must scrutinize the world.
Adding a great deal to this gripping first act is the performance of Menchaca (Ozark, The Outsider), who imbues Jessica’s unnamed tormentor with a controlled ferocity veiled by outward politesse. Bumping into the man too frequently for coincidence, Jessica knows that she can’t trust his professions of friendliness, yet neither can she quite bring herself to alert the police. The result of her paralysis is a half-hour of moviemaking that is likely to find audiences shouting at the screen. (“Just run him over!” my wife exclaimed during a singularly tense moment.) We recognize where all of this is heading; Jessica senses it, too, but is beholden, for far too long, to an unbending law of etiquette.
Given the tautness of the film’s early scenes, it is almost a relief when Jessica’s fears come to fruition and she finds herself held prisoner in a cabin cellar. Though the escape and wilderness sequences that follow are standard fare, Hyams is never less than sure-handed in his direction, and Willcox (Bloodline, On the Rocks) thrives in a physically demanding role. Among the highlights of this part of the movie are a harrowing good Samaritan episode and a nail-biting turn in which Jessica stows away in the man’s SUV. But don’t sleep on the shot, a few seconds lengthier than is strictly necessary, in which Hyams conveys the vastness of the wild by panning slowly up a strand of pines. These woods are dark and deep, the camera means to show us. If Jessica intends to survive, she will have to save herself.
Alone is not, of course, a particularly original movie. Observing its highway cat-and-mouse scenes, many viewers will think of Steven Spielberg’s 1971 debut, Duel, which played similarly with the idea that other drivers are probably best avoided. Contemplating the forest-enclosed battle of wits between Jessica and the man, others will recall The River Wild, which saw Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon in comparable roles, or The Most Dangerous Game, to which all human quarry films owe a debt. My own recollection while watching was of the surprise 2003 hit Open Water, another movie that plunged little-known actors into mortal danger. Like that thriller, Alone leaves itself open to the charge that we have little reason to care about such hastily sketched characters. But in both cases, the speed at which the gears grind is part of the delicious, depraved fun.
Of further benefit in this hyperpolitical age is the fact that Alone has no ambitions beyond telling its story well. Though a partisan critic might interrogate Menchaca’s wardrobe design (incel chic) and brand of masculinity (obviously toxic), the film is not about gender dynamics, #MeToo, or the Trumpification of men. For this reason, if for no other, one wonders if Alone rather than Tenet ought to have been the back-to-the-movies offering of the summer. Unlike Christopher Nolan’s disastrous boondoggle, Hyams’s picture knows exactly what it is and heads single-mindedly in that direction. Its pleasures are less expensive, to be sure, but they are coherent, fine-edged, and visceral in their effect.
Alone is, all told, the kind of movie that “the movies” were made for, a perfect way to end an autumn evening, the darker, the better. You’ll probably have to stream it, given the brevity of its theatrical run. But you are highly unlikely to regret the choice.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
