Alone with You

Alone with You

Nowadays, “the pandemic metaphor” is a category in cinematic sub-genres. It has been and was made clear by last year’s Sundance Film Festival with films like the ambitious ‘How it Ends’ and the exceptional ‘The Pink Cloud,’ both of which are not directly about Covid-19 but do explore some of the same sentiments as being locked down.

However, this wave of movies (or watching them through this lens) began before Sundance 2021 even happened from Joaquìn Cociña and Cristóbal León’s terrifying animation “The Wolf House” to Amy Seimetz’s stylish psychodrama “She Dies Tomorrow,” there were several movies that seemed to be deeply in conversation with the virus psychology just months into the pandemic. Some would even say that “Palm Springs,” an average time-loop rom-com released in the summer of 2020 about a wedding that gets stuck on repeat, is about quarantine.

What I’m trying to say is that pandemic metaphor movies are already played out if they’re not doing anything new or interesting beyond screaming “it’s lonely and claustrophobic and suffocating in lockdown.” Which brings us to Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks’ debut feature ‘Alone With You,’ a claustrophobia-forward horror-thriller that reads as predictable “shot entirely during Covid.” Except at least as genre goes, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t chill or scare there are almost no chills or scares; it doesn’t have much plot, let alone enough to stretch to feature-length; and its camera work is amateurish when it isn’t on autopilot.

There might’ve been a zippy little short here, who knows? But that’s not what we’ve got. In the 83-minute ‘Alone With You’ a poor man’s version of ‘She Dies Tomorrow,’ with some David Lynch clumsily mixed in we are (mostly) alone with Charlie (played by Bennett), a professional make-up artist waiting for her girlfriend Simone (Emma Myles) to come home to their small, handsomely decorated Brooklyn apartment. She’s got it bad; we see her leave amorous voicemails and put on a silky nightie in preparation as soon as she hangs up with Simone. But something is off-kilter when she drops a glass of red wine into the bubbly bathtub she’s soaking herself in. The filmmakers do not exactly play coy about the fact that Charlie does not quite have a sound handle on time. (Oh, these pandemic metaphors)!

In sequences that add up to little more than self-indulgent-video-project-at-best, we follow Charlie as she repeatedly FaceTimes with a close friend who seems to be having an amazing time at a bar, circles her claustrophobic apartment in changing hairdos and outfits (the film cannot resist trying its hand at dream logic), keeps topping up her booze supply. In the film’s only genuinely interesting sequence, she takes an emergency video call from her mom Barbara Crampton, an overly religious, overbearing woman disapproving of Charlie and unsubtly unaccepting of her sexual orientation; after a heated conversation Charlie learns about her grandmother’s passing and goes to look for the necklace she’s gifted on mom’s request.

However, wait Why is it daytime on her mom’s screen? Who screams and begs through the vents? Why can’t she see the date or time on her computer screen? And, really, why won’t her front door or windows open?

The answers are painfully obvious yet Bennett and Brooks still stretch the film thin, wending inelegant flashbacks to Charlie’s past with Simone into their narrative along with a devastating infidelity. There are also beach interludes and repeated 911 calls from Charlie asking for rescue from where she is. But help doesn’t come. Instead what arrives is a growing sense of madness among sheet covered mannequins in her apartment’s dark room and blood-soaked hallucinations. Is she crazy? Is she already dead? Or did she do something bad? Again, the movie isn’t exactly coy about what’s going on with Charlie’s psychosis; just know that if you’re patient enough to wait for it you will likely be let down by the fizzle of a reveal.

Watch Alone with You For Free On Gomovies.