“Alone” : Escaping An Isolated Mountainside

She’s moving out of town, following her own path after the tragic passing of her partner, but is she alone, as the movie title, Alone, suggests? How far will she go to run away from her emotions regarding his sudden passing and the subsequent resurface of her own individualized personhood? It’s humble new beginnings for her surely, traveling up mountainous roads in a small car and equally small attached U-Haul.

In the perfect fall scene, she attempts to pass another slow driver on such a road but in passing through the one lane road on the other side, she is forced back behind the right lane car again when a semi appears. Tense settings come to front here as the main character finds herself at a dark gas station at night later, confronted once more by the vehicle she would have previously surpassed if not for sudden appearance of the semi as well as the equally sudden aggression from the other car.

She’s chasing her own tragic demons but who’s chasing her now? Has she made herself an unwitting target to some out-of-touch mountaineer? The close camera angles give certain tight consideration to these themes for sure. The haunting reality of stirring up the wrong side of a stranger on the road gives enough room for this film to earn its place in dreams or rather one’s deepest nightmares. 

Confronted continually by such a stranger, Alone certainly reveals what can become of one such main character’s rational theories and realities. Late at night, isolated, there’s definitely a cinematic strike here to the power of grief over a person’s present sense of security, safety, and ideas of their own future itself. 

The movie gives its own spooky, effective realism to these ideas of striking out on your own and potentially creating the unwitting victim of strangers and maybe even of life itself, coming to you in digestible titled segments. The plausibility given isolation will speak for itself long after the tense, rainy night sequences between predator and prey conclude.