Films predominantly set in a single location have the opportunity to offer a rare intimacy. In everyday life as in cinema, the social aspect of human nature is dominant. This opportunity can be dismissed, as we saw in Alfred Hitchcock’s early masterpiece Lifeboat (1944), when he rejected the introverted nature of the one location story. He instead explored the interpersonal relationships between a group of survivors stranded in the Atlantic ocean after their liner was sunk by a German submarine.
Co-directors and writers Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks take the alternative approach, isolating their character in her two-story Brooklyn apartment. Alone with You (2021) is an intimately claustrophobic story with an energetic visual aesthetic that exposes its protagonist’s emotional vulnerability.
Charlie (Emily Bennett) is eagerly awaiting the return of her girlfriend Simone (Emma Myles), who has been out-of-town on a photoshoot. Her preparations for a romantic welcome home are interrupted by a series of unsettling incidents.
The apartment door jams, trapping her inside, and tarps hang down over the windows. She hears the cries and pleas of an anxious neighbour through the vent. The lights flicker, strange shadows lurk in her peripheral vision and she hears someone moving around the apartment. Conversations with her friend Thea (Dora Madison) and mother (Barbara Crampton), begin to reveal that Charlie may be in denial about her and Simone’s troubled relationship.
The beginning of Alone with You effectively mixes tones to keep the audience off-balance. The opening image of the tide on the beach complements the affection between the two lovers, but this takes an unsettling turn when it looks like Simone has committed an act of betrayal. We see Charlie scream in a way that recalls the panic-stricken terror of Donald Sutherland in The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Kaufman, 1978). Transitioning to the warm tones of Charlie on the waterfront, before returning to the apartment to welcome Simone home, continues these unpredictable tonal shifts.
From the opening scenes a possible emotional break in logic is introduced, but throughout we continue to seek the rational explanation amidst the chaos. We want to believe there’s a simple explanation beneath the puzzling incidents. Hence, we revert to the conclusion that the only way this story can be explained is that it’s a dream. The expectation that Bennett and Brooks might be pursuing this cliché stirs a feeling of frustration – it’s unsatisfying to put a mystery under the umbrella of a dream instead of finding a creative way to make sense of the chaos.
An expressionist vision borne from anguish, Alone with You should be a dream or nightmare to honour the emotional nature of expressionist intent. The way in which Brooks and his co-editor Ward Crockett cut through time in the opening scenes is jarring, disrupting a traditional flow and rhythm, but it effectively conveys the disjointed logic of dreams.
Alone With You becomes a cacophony of possible meanings, lending itself to interpretation. Is the voice from the vent that of her neighbour, or is it her own subconscious voice? Are there two versions of ourselves, the internal and external? The movement between scenes on the beach and inside the apartment suggests Bennett and Brooks are attentive to duality. The shadowy presence is likely her imagination projecting repressed turbulent emotions that can only be conveyed when we dream or tell stories.
Charlie reminds us how natural it is to repress memories and deny what we know. A victim of her own neediness, she’s unable to love and value herself. She needs Simone or someone else in her life to fulfil these basic needs. When a person is possessive towards a lover it can be them trying to fill a hole within themselves.
It’s difficult to trust the flashbacks because they’re unreliable memories, a self-constructed story by and for Charlie. There are scenes when Bennett’s performance feels unnatural, but they’re not to the film’s detriment because they feed the impression that she’s constructing a fabricated story about her relationship that she desperately wants to believe. The bond we form with Charlie can undermine our objectivity, and the fascinating part of experiencing Alone With You is how far we fall down the proverbial rabbit hole.
The technical aspects cannot be faulted; there’s an energy to the visual aesthetic that immerses us in Charlie’s ordeal. The narrative will likely be divisive and unsatisfying to some audiences, but Bennett and Brooks effectively play on the theme of how we’re vulnerable to our minds, which can play tricks, and deceive us.
Alone With You is an entertaining and suspenseful story, but looking under its skin and we see that the film is an exploration of complicated cognitive processes. Charlie’s mind can be interpreted as the antagonist of the drama that orchestrates her ordeal. Her mind is trying to use defence mechanisms to protect her, but it’s overwhelmed by emotional trauma. Bennett and Brooks’ film is a deceptive work, with more to say than a first glance suggests.