Mark Reviews Movies: ALONE WITH YOU

Alone with You, Dark Star Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 3, 2022

Mood goes a long way in a horror tale, and Alone with You requires and accomplishes a pretty strong one. The film, co-written and co-directed by Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, takes place almost exclusively inside a single space: a fairly cramped one-bedroom apartment in New York City. There simply—and literally—isn't a lot of room for much gimmickry and action, so the filmmakers take a more minimalistic route, giving us a fairly haunting depiction of a young woman's confrontation with personal demons of uncertainty, insecurity, guilt, or all and more of those things.

The woman is Charlie, who's played by Bennett in a precisely shifting performance of mounting fear, doubt, and regret. Charlie is at home, in that tiny apartment, waiting for her girlfriend to return. It's the couple's anniversary, and she wants to celebrate with a quiet, romantic night together.

She just has to wait. The waiting, though, becomes more waiting.

The girlfriend isn't answering her phone or responding to texts. Thea (Dora Madison), a mutual friend of the couple, contacts Charlie and asks her to come out to the bar. When Charlie explains that she's waiting, Thea suggests that the girlfriend might not arrive. She did warn Charlie about Simone (Emma Myles), a photographer, and her self-absorbed ways, after all. Charlie didn't listen then, and she doesn't want to believe it now.

The simplicity of the story—a woman waiting—and the central mystery—Simone's absence—here is matched by the gradual, modest ways that the filmmakers reveal that there might something else going on in this apartment. Charlie receives a video call from her judgmental mother (played by Barbara Crampton) on her laptop. While the scene gives us a sense of that relationship and how much Charlie has to hide about her life, it also makes her—and us—realize that time in the apartment is off-kilter.

That's not a metaphor. It's dark outside, even though it seems to be daytime at her mother's house, and when Charlie tries to look outside or leave the apartment, an unnatural darkness blocks her view, while a jammed door prevents her from exiting.

Whether or not all of the games that Bennett (on the filmmaking side, since the performance is consistent and engaging) and Brooks are playing here—ghostly figures lurking out of sight behind Charlie, the disembodied voice of a neighbor through a vent, a series of repetitive calls to 9-1-1—make sense by the end is mostly irrelevant. Within its restricted setting and narrative, the film creates its own kind of logic—a mindset of anticipation turning to doubt, paranoia, anxiety, and, finally, something much darker than any of those feelings.

The answers to the increasing mysteries of Alone with You aren't unique or particularly surprising. Again, that's mostly irrelevant, because the atmosphere and questions Bennett and Brooks invent and allow to linger are so haunting.

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