Alone

Alone explores threat as a sustained, escalating, note, denying viewers any level of release by refusing to leave the assailed's side. We're in this with them. Jules Willcox's Jessica is introduced packing up her meagre belongings before she departs for a self-imposed isolation. Jessica is, straight out the gate, portrayed as forthright and adaptable, willing to abandon well-appointed furniture and a healthy looking house plant rather than wait around for help. She avoids speaking to her mother, waiting until she is a significant distance away from her family before she allows the nagging in. Jessica desires loneliness, her every action labouring towards a peaceful, solitary space. The first crime committed by Marc Menchaca's otherwise unnamed Man then is that he intrudes.

Before Man has made his intentions clear, Alone works to put you in the headspace of a young woman travelling hundreds of miles on her own. A cigarette break at a reasonably busy truck stop simmers with ambient menace - the camera tracking back-and-forth, following the dawdling men, simulating the calculations going on in Jessica's mind. How close is he? Where is that guy going? Is that man coming this way? Similarly, Man's Bundy-esque attempts to trick Jessica into putting herself at risk repeatedly fail. Her antennae is already up. Director John Hyams and screenwriter Mattias Olsson (the writer-director of Gone, the Swedish film on which Alone is based) are priming you for an abnormal serial killer thriller. One in which the The Final Girl is the first girl. Jessica a born fighter, able to meet the challenges put in front of her, battling in every moment until she's the one holding a bloody car wrench, the weapon held low in a Waki-gamae sword stance, ready to strike.