The internet is often accused of annihilating the personhood of other people, encouraging everyone on it to regard only themselves as whole, complex individuals worthy of empathy, and everyone else as pond scum. This is a dire read, but not an inaccurate one. Driving, however, should get some credit for doing the same first.
Behind the wheel, everyone else is a potential aggravation, a metal jellybean waiting to piss you off rather than a person. The anonymity of the road affords us the space to be petty tyrants; it also puts us at risk. Someone else can decide to reflect your perceived tyranny back at you. Annoyance can escalate to conflict. A fellow traveler can become something more sinister.
It’s important that Alone begins on the road. The minimalist 2020 thriller, now streaming on Netflix, leans into the archetypal sorting the brain does behind the wheel, immediately locking the viewer in on a primal level with its inciting incident. A woman is driving on a long trip through remote roads, hauling a trailer behind her sensible car loaded with all her possessions for a move. She tries to drive around a green SUV. The SUV accelerates, refusing to let her pass, and nearly forcing her into an oncoming truck. It’s frightening, and infuriating, but then she shakes it off… until she keeps seeing that same green SUV.
Directed by John Hyams (the low-budget auteur behind Netflix’s best zombie show), Alone is a wickedly taut two-hander, with its lead, Jessica (Jules Willcox) slowly realizing with horror that Sam (Marc Menchaca) is not merely running into her out of coincidence. Mattias Olsson’s script doesn’t give much in the way of backstory on either character, but it hardly matters. Willcox and Menchaca are both adept performers capable of gripping you with their gaze alone — giving depth to Jessica’s growing desperation and Sam’s initially friendly menace.
As their conflict escalates, Alone — through spare dialogue and careful direction — becomes almost fable-like, less ambitious than, say, Men, but ultimately more successful. Jessica could be any woman. Sam could be any man. That’s why you feel your body tighten more and more as the film’s 97-minute run time races by.
Image: XYZ Films/Magnet Releasing
To fans of direct-to-video action movies, John Hyams is a legend best known for 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, arguably one of the most provocative action films of its decade. In that film, Hyams established a visual style of bleak naturalism, a fondness for muted colors, and a distaste for medium shots. This brutally efficient combination makes his films feel hyper-real, uncomfortably so.
Hyams shoots in a way that underlines his characters’ psychological isolation, not just their physical one — dense forests are seen from above and from the characters’ perspective below. Bodies are blocked in a way that heightens their physicality, filling the screen or getting lost in it. Close-ups are reserved for pure reptilian moments of fear or adrenaline. While Hyams can dial aspects of this up or down — the gore and violence in Alone, for example, is minimal — the director is consistently skilled at visually triggering lizard-brain responses in the viewer, making him an excellent, if underappreciated, cinematic purveyor of isolation thrillers. Alone could be considered the middle entry in a loose trilogy of Hyams films about the subject, from Day of Reckoning to his most recent film, 2022’s COVID-themed horror film Sick.
These three films are wildly different, but there’s a similar nasty edge to all of them, about what happens when you allow inertia to blunt your sense of empathy. Alone is easily the most accessible of the bunch, beginning with a nigh-universal experience of road rage, and then slowly dragging its characters into the literal mud until its hero must violently assert her personhood in the face of indifference. It didn’t have to go that far, of course. But that’s John Hyams’ specialty: taking something casually terrible to its awful logical end. Like, for example, the petty tyranny of driving.
Alone is now streaming on Netflix.
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