Alone (2020): Daringly Simple To A Fault

For as much as the extrovert in me hated those don't talk to strangers PSA's, I understand that it only takes one bad apple to ruin the bunch, though I do wonder how it would affect our societal sociology if the news reported every time someone who had an interaction with a stranger didn't get kidnapped. Nevertheless, I wonder if Jessica has had the bad fortune of stumbling upon the whole orchard. When she wakes up from the forcibly-administered drugs, she finds herself locked in a strange basement with a strange man watching her. What follows is ninety-eight minutes of occasionally tense escape attempts interspersed with little else. Alone is one of the more realistic dramas I've seen, and this is both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, this movie feels extremely urgent. On the other, it runs out of ideas when given even less than enough time to. Still, in a world oversaturated with overdone blockbusters, there's something keenly satisfying about a movie willing to be so unadorned.

Alone is a very simple story. In many ways, it feels like a first draft of a better screenplay. It's little more than a series of strange encounters with a strange man on a strange road, encounters that turn from strange to sinister before you can say together, we can find a child. This movie doesn't really do anything wrong, but it doesn't do enough, either. I wish it were more substantial, that it would have worked to flesh out its story to avoid feeling aimless from time to time. Without fail, this aimlessness is the number one problem I always run into when writing a first draft for any story, and Alone would have benefited from even one additional subplot or a couple of extra rewrites, maybe both. Nevertheless, this same lack of narrative thrust makes it very believable, and Alone doesn't demand much suspension of disbelief or imagination on the part of the viewer. It plays like some macabre story you'd see on the nightly news, feeling immediate because of it. And because she's at a disadvantage in every way, everything Jessica does to try and escape seems like it actually matters.

Still I wish this story were bigger, more complex. I understand that I'm doing little more than repeating myself by this point, but Alone didn't give me as much to talk about as I wish it would. Don't get me wrong, it's minimalism has plenty of appeal, but this is a double-edged sword. It runs for only a little over an hour-and-a-half, yet this runtime manages to somehow be far too long for a story like this one. The real draw of this movie is most definitely its characters, who elevate it through some top-tier performances by Marc Menchaca and Jules Wilcox. This story is about these characters instead of the world they inhabit, and even if they don't quite have the depth to do all the pulling that Alone needs them to, they remain interesting enough. I was rooting for Jessica the entire time, and its important for a small-scale story like this one to make a character worth rooting for - what else could it lean on?

I think my favorite thing about Alone has to be its plausibility. It's a simple story, the type you would see on the nightly news, and I think it ironic that this same simplicity also limits it. Alone refuses to come up with enough material to fill even a relatively short, ninety-eight minute runtime, and you will distinctly feel the gaps in the narrative where the writers simply didn't come up with enough ideas, perhaps even by design. Still, it overcomes these weaknesses with enough sheer grit and admirable sincerity to probably make real-life kidnappings drop by a significant percentage among its prospective audience. Its performances are equally lifelike, and Menchaca and Wilcox take this movie the distance with a more-than-capable portrayal of predator and prey, a welcome distraction from the fact that Alone doesn't bother to do much else.

Alone - 6/10

Philippians 4:11-13