In short: Alone (2020)

Warning: there are mild spoilers ahead!

After her husband has committed suicide, Jessica (Jules Willcox) has decided to escape her feelings of guilt and grief by moving to the other side of the USA. She’s making the move on her own, carting a U-Haul trailer around country roads and lonely streets.

Apart from the emotional pain, things start out okay enough on her travels, but a strange and dangerous encounter with another car does leave her a bit insecure and understandably nervous. Something that’s not going to get better once she starts meeting the driver (Marc Menchaca) of this car again and again, as if he were stalking her. Which he will indeed turn out to do, eventually kidnapping Jessica for a bit of emotional torture in his cabin in the wilderness, with the promise of eventual death.

Jessica manages to escape though, and now has to find her way to safety through forest wilderness, with little but the clothes on her back, followed by her kidnapper.

I was a bit disappointed by the last eight years or so of director Jack Hyams’s output, when he left behind low budget movies for the greener pastures of TV and particularly streaming series work. It’s not his fault I really don’t need another (or two) zombie apocalypse shows in my life, obviously.

Alone isn’t a return to highly weird and awesome action movies like the fourth Universal Soldier film, but a thriller working from a script (by Mattias Olsson) that is built from very well-known blocks. However, despite certainly not being in the market for originality prices, this is still a very strong film. The script’s sequence of chases and escapes is very tightly arranged, written with sharp focus on what makes a situation threatening as well as an eye for the telling quotidian detail that makes a thriller situation feel less constructed than it by rights should feel. The characterisation of Jessica as a woman burdened by grief and a feeling of terrible guilt is sharp and tight too. Hyams’s careful direction, Willcox’s wonderfully emotionally controlled performance and the script’s attention to the right details, really come together to make Jessica believable as well as easy to root for.

Menchaca’s performance, on the other hand, is wonderfully creepy without turning his character into some mythological being. The film treats its serial killer as a human being, as terrible a one as he is, actually making him more threatening through his fallibility than many a movie about the superhumanly competent variation of the serial killer manages.

Hyams, it turns out, is as great a director of this sort of horror thriller as he is of crazier action stuff, using his experience with action scenes whenever it is appropriate, but spending just as much of his energy on creating a threatening – and generally unpleasantly wet – mood through landscape, and on assisting his performers.