Currently available to view on Apple TV+ after a brief theatrical release, You Won’t Be Alone is an astonishingly accomplished feature film debut by Australian-Macedonian writer-director Goran Stolevski. Seeking to capture aspects of what’s left of a fast-disappearing traditional rural culture that represents his own ancestral heritage, Stolevski creates a unique and mesmerizing folk horror film about the life experiences of a witch who kills and occupies the bodies and existences of various peasants in remote nineteenth-century Macedonia.

The film, though shot realistically and beautifully in the mountainous countryside, has a dreamlike quality all its own. It begins with a fairy-tale story structure, as a peasant woman discovers a terrifying creature from local folklore called a “wolf-eateress” (Anamaria Marinca) sitting beside her baby’s cradle, contemplating killing it to drink its blood. It’s a shocking, raw figure in the form of a naked middle-aged woman, but with crusty red skin all over, black lips, and only a few wisps of hair clinging to its skull. The wolf-eateress makes a bargain with the desperate mother to forego killing the baby if she can come to claim her as a surrogate daughter when the child is sixteen years old. She seals the bargain by wounding the child’s throat, stilling her voice.

In a continuing approximation of the Sleeping Beauty narrative, the mother seeks to avoid fulfilling the ghastly bargain by hiding her child and raising her in secret. The girl, named Nevena, grows up in grim isolation in a sacred cave marked by crosses, open at the ceiling to let in light and air. She sees only her mother, who intermittently brings her food and cares for her. Mute and stunted by sensory and social deprivation, she develops a poetic interior language of her own devising that serves as the voice-over of the film. In it, she refers to her mother as “whisper-mama.”