I Will Never Leave You Alone
He wasn’t the best husband, he wasn’t the best father, his wife Emma obviously struggling with the demands of the sleepless, crying baby and likely postpartum depression, he making empty promises to stop gambling, to control his drinking, to quit the drugs, the warning signs there from the start that he would be unreliable when she needed stability and support, but the two of them were committed to each other and the pregnancy and none of them deserved what happened.
Having served six years for involuntary manslaughter, Richard Marwood has been a model prisoner, causing no problems and liked by the wardens; work found for him to help the transition back into society, he is tasked by a real estate agent to spend six days in an old farmhouse allegedly haunted following the deaths of the previous occupants, candles to be lit and cleansing prayers to be read at dusk every night, Richard locked inside alone with the ghosts and his own demons with no means of escape.
A claustrophobic descent of guilt and regret as slow-burning as the thick candles, of burdens too great to ever be lifted, I Will Never Leave You Alone was the promise Richard (Kenneth Trujillo) made to Emma (Katerina Eichenberger) now thrown back as him a threat by the entity which inhabits the crumbling house once inhabited by a woman who the locals called a witch, hanged in the adjacent forest from “the witching tree,” Richard held prisoner on the day he was paroled and every object a burning reminder of the past.
Written and directed by Pollen’s D W Medoff, Richard is trapped in the dust and living in the cracks of what was his former life, the shadow of that unhappy existence a battered dream he now wishes he could recapture, perhaps do things differently even as he continues to turn a blind eye to aberrations in his own behaviour, unable to interact with others who might open a door to his worst self but finding a way anyhow, swallowing great gulps of mouthwash even though he is supposedly not drinking.
The convenient tingling buzz of alcohol seeing him through the days in the decayed property and his only companionship unexpectedly sympathetic handyman Mike (Christopher Genovese), at night the nightmares come, a clawed hand seeking him out; is it Emma trying to contact him, the witch Elsie Morgan, or simply a manifestation his own inexpressible grief and guilt, the knowledge that he may not have been directly responsible for the terrible things that happened no comfort when the truth is that he could easily have been a better man.
Built around the permeating atmosphere of decay and Trujillo’s almost wordless performance as the brooding, broken man, trapped in place that alone is insufficient to make I Will Never Leave You Alone more than an unfulfilled premise, reliant on Kimberly Maxwell’s aggressively perky realtor to set up the contrived situation of the “hangza” cleansing then doing little than having the voices of the dead for company for a lonely man, A Ghost Waits having told a similar story more enjoyably while The Coffee Table explored the devastation of tragedy with more urgency.
I Will Never Leave You Alone is streaming on the Arrow platform now
