Alone Together: Review

10th November 2023

Alone Together: Review. By Simon Thompson

The advent of Jordan Peele has been a somewhat double-edged sword for the horror genre : on the one hand he has given us one admittedly excellent movie (Get Out), but on the other horror has now become stuffed to the gills like Mr Creosote at an all you can eat buffet with Jordan Peele wannabes, such as Will Kresch, the director of Alone Together. Alone Together can best be described as a Poundland Jordan Peele movie, it’s a meandering, ponderously scripted, predictable affair with twists and turns that are visible from space.

Set during an even more extreme version of the Covid-19 pandemic, the movie focuses on Nas, a woman who is trapped in an abusive relationship with her controlling boyfriend Luke. As a kill two birds with one stone solution the pair decide to head to Luke’s isolated rural cabin in the woods so that they may both heal their relationship and also wait out the pandemic. Of course, barely any of this goes to plan as it turns out the cabin is, inevitably, haunted by a malevolent supernatural entity which wreaks havoc on anybody who ever stays in the cabin.

To be fair to Will Kresch he does have a good eye for visuals. Alone Together is a beautiful movie to look at and this is down to Kresch’s instinct for choosing the right colour palettes for each scene, with the more dialogue heavy sections being presented in a naturalistic Children of Men style sepia tone and the tense sections taking on a lurid 1970s quality in the vein of movies like the original Wicker Man or Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975).

If I had to put my finger on the biggest issue with the film’s narrative it’s that Kresch tries to balance too many narrative threads at once. Horror is at its most effective when you have a simple story to imbue dread and atmosphere into as it chugs along- something which Kresch doesn’t seem to understand as Alone Together fails to juggle its dystopian plot at the same time as the personal drama of Nas and Luke to the overall detriment of the story. Character elements which could be plot points in themselves are brought up via dialogue and then seemingly forgotten about several scenes later, to the point you wish there had been some sort of steroided- to- the- gills script doctor on set intimidating Kresch into finding a single focus.

The acting of the two leads, Deanna Wright and Matthew Kresch for the most part can be described as competent and believable. Wright does a strong turn in portraying her character’s fear and vulnerability with the scene where Nas breaks her leg in the woods being a particular highlight, with Wright exhibiting both the pain and anguish of the injury and the fear of not being able to find treatment in such an isolated area all at the same time. Matthew Kresch has a much showier part in Luke and although his portrayal isn’t exactly a masterclass in De Niro style understatement, he does bring out the character’s most hateable qualities to the fullest extent.

While Wright and Matthew Kresch’s performances work, they are let down by the movie’s script. William Kresch’s and AV Bach’s writing is dull and obvious, exhausting every horror cliché in the book as if they were on a 2 for 1 sale. I wouldn’t mind as much if Bach and Kresch took what we have come to expect from the horror genre and did something interesting with it, but the writing is so dull and transparent you can finish large portions of the dialogue yourself before the next line is uttered.

To conclude, Alone Together can be a gorgeous movie to simply look at but it all falls apart as soon as the characters open their mouths. Kresch tries to tell too many stories at once himself instead of finding a cohesive and singular plotline, and more often than not is content with copying far better filmmakers and writers than himself rather than letting his individual work stand on its own merit.

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