Alone With Her (2007)
Runtime: 79 mins
Theatrical Release: Jan 17, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: Surveillance is often used by directors who are keen to add a voyeuristic touch to their work, and has been cleverly used as a plot device in classics such as BODY DOUBLE, THE CONVERSATION, and REAR WINDOW. In ALONE WITH HER, director Eric Nicholas (RIVER RATS) takes the theme to its logical... Surveillance is often used by directors who are keen to add a voyeuristic touch to their work, and has been cleverly used as a plot device in classics such as BODY DOUBLE, THE CONVERSATION, and REAR WINDOW. In ALONE WITH HER, director Eric Nicholas (RIVER RATS) takes the theme to its logical conclusion, shooting an entire movie on cameras stashed in ingenious locations by the film's central protagonist, Doug (Colin Hanks). Doug is a dangerous loner who whiles away the hours by filming unsuspecting women on hidden cameras, ultimately developing an infatuation with Amy (Ana Claudia Talancon). But after Doug has wired up her home with cameras and microphones, he takes the ruse one step further, using the information he's garnered to align his tastes with Amy's in order to impress her at a "chance" meeting. Naturally, Amy thinks they have a lot in common after meeting him and they begin dating, which only spurs him on to greater surveillance-related depravity. It's to Nicholas's inestimable credit that he doesn't fall into the trap of letting his clever point-of-view gimmick transcend the actual content of his movie. In fact, ALONE WITH HER is a fine 21st-century thriller that genre luminaries such as Hitchcock and De Palma would doubtless be proud of, thanks in part to compelling performances from Hanks and Talancon. But the director also manages to conjure up a palpable feeling of unease as Hanks's creepy character goes to extraordinary lengths to win the heart of his obsession, and adds just enough intrigue to keep viewers guessing how this cautionary tale will end up. [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Colin Hanks, Ana Claudia Talancon, Jordana Spiro, Mel Gorham
DVD Info
Release:
May 22, 2007
DVD Features:
- Keep Case
Audio:
- Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround - English, French
- Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround - English, French
- Subtitles - English, Spanish
Additional Release Material:
- Alternate Ending
- Additional Footage - Terrifying Never-Before-Seen Footage
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
A neatly insinuating idea, flawlessly executed, Alone With Her marks out its stars and director as ones to watch.
A smart, unsettling drama that finds new uses for tatics devised by movies like The Stepfather and The Blair Witch Project.
Alone With Her is a pretty engaging tale, and it's refreshing to see a well-acted, suspenseful drama made without a bloated budget or a lot of bloodletting.
A novel spin on an oft-told tale, Alone with Her is a fine little indie indeed. What could have been just another gimmick flick turns out to be a pretty intense ride.
The moral of the story: If you meet someone whose tastes mirror your own to a scary degree, then by all means, be scared.
Despite its cleverness, however, nearly everything is predictable; in a sense, this is a higher-tech version of The Collector, and it doesn't really take us anywhere we haven't been many times before.
This isn't a psychological horror film so much as a slice-of-life twentysomething tale, in which one party happens to be quietly very not-normal.
Alone with Her has a dog and a rampant sense of dread, the kind you don't recover from for at least a few days. I'm on the first day.
Alone With Her plays like an extended voyeur video with nothing new to say about hidden cameras or stalkers or anything.
Even a conventional, albeit cynical, ending can’t ruin such effective mood-making.
... this low-budget horror flick builds some claustrophobic tension out of modern anxieties, but it won't scare the bejesus out of you.
Leadenly scripted and blandly overliteral and therefore never capitalizes on the provocativeness of its premise.
exudes the overall uncomfortable air of watching a depraved home movie
Alone With Her is a tense, well-shot little thriller in the vein of 'fatal attraction' youth flicks like Fear, The Crush, and Swimfan.
Through Hanks' and Talancon's subtle, naturalistic performance [writer-director Eric Nicholas] cultivates a human dimension often missing from thrillers.
Alone With Her has the kind of high ick factor that leaves you squirming -- not because Doug is so diabolical a creation, but because what he does to satisfy his pathology is so practical.
For all its technological ingenuity, however, the film is ultimately a fairly routine stalker thriller that soon becomes repetitive in its contrivances. And the footage, necessarily shot on digital video, is not particularly easy to watch.
A B-picture waiting to cut loose in its final 15 minutes, when it devolves into generic stalker-thriller theatrics of the Julia-Roberts-in-distress kind.
A Blair Witch Project for the new, surveillance-obsessed millennium.
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