You Are Not Alone

In Montreal, twentysomething Léo (Pier-Luc Funk) delivers pizza and gets drunk, and that’s pretty much it. He’s alone and he’s sad, and doing nothing about it … until he meets Rita (Marianne Fortier), a sweet-natured musician who thinks he might be a keeper. The thing is, Léo is already taken; he’s just been targeted by an alien (François Papineau) who preys on Montreal’s lonely and alienated men and doesn’t much care if Léo’s luck has turned.

With their first feature film, long-time collaborators (and real-life partners) Marie-Hélène Viens and Philippe Lupien are performing a radical genre experiment, mashing up P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (TIFF ’02) and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (TIFF ’13) to create a new hybrid lifeform.

Funk finds the wounded heart that Léo hides behind his short fuse, while Fortier is his complete opposite as the open, empathetic Rita, who knows a diamond in the rough when she sees one. It’s just weird that this older guy keeps following him around, right?

A strange and gentle study of alienation, redemption, and hope, You Are Not Alone is one of the oddest and most daring Canadian movies in a long time … and maybe one of the best. You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

NORM WILNER

Content advisory: mature themes, sexually suggestive scenes, coarse language