Masterful Cinema

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Ellie, supposedly about 25 years old, is played by a woman easily in her 50s. There is a problem at the outset. The director had some good ideas, and hired a good photographer, but overall the story is a failure--a weirdo slasher ghost story failure. Skip this one.

I rarely turn a movie off, I do my best to give it the benefit of the doubt and hope it will get better, some movies start off slow...this one...never picked up! From the first 5 minutes I was bored out of my mind and couldn't say my usual "have to finish this, I already have time invested that I will never get back" but this one has made my top 5 of worst movies I've ever seen. after 15 minutes I couldn't take the lack of dialog, terrible dialog (when there actually was any), lack of a plot, beyond slow and horrendous "acting". some movie that are classified as thrillers or psychological thrillers, which this was supposed to be missed the mark by miles.

I'm not a person that goes online to write movie reviews, but this movie is so terrible that I felt obligated to write a review for others so they don't waste their time or money on this garbage movie. This is without a doubt the worst movie I've ever seen in my lifetime. It is so beyond boring, and no part of the movie makes ANY sense whatsoever. The budget on this movie must have been like $1,000 no joke. To get the movie to a normal running time they had to repeat multiple scenes over and over as filler to waste time and confuse the viewer even further. Anyone involved with the making of this worthless POS movie should be ashamed. A child with a camcorder could make a better movie than this worthless waste. By a long stretch one of the most boring, generic, pointless, confusing, most low budget films that exist.

As far as I can tell from my extensive research (10 minutes on IMDb), this is the first movie in which Lucy Benjamin has appeared. She is more well known in the UK for her role as Lisa Fowler in the soap opera Eastenders ('oy mate, you been shafting my sister, innit?' etc.). She has also acted in other British TV soaps, sitcoms and series. She is a reasonably good actress, so I don't think the blame can be laid on her for this stonker of a movie. Instead, I think we have to point a finger (or two) at director/writer Tristan Versluis. He has also directed a handful of other movies, but his main involvement in movies and TV series has been for make-up, including top-rating shows like Game of Thrones. Anyways, Not Alone (a.k.a. 'The Haunting of Ellie Rose') is badly written and poorly directed. It is predictable and clichéd, and, apart (possibly) from the main role, seriously lacks character development - as we all know, if you can't empathize with any of the main characters, a movie will not hold your attention or stir your emotions (for instance, horror films are supposed to be scary...). On the positive side, some of the photography and filming is very good quality, but the low budget is clearly reflected in the limited locations, poor costuming, limited soundtrack, and dodgy 'special effects'. Versluis does well in the make-up department (where his experience lies) - Ellie Rose's broken wrist is gruesomely real, as are the dead bodies sitting around the kitchen table. But somewhere around the start of the third and final stage of this movie, the viewer begins to realize that there are no surprising twists in store, and that they have just wasted 80 minutes of their life. Let's hope Lucy Benjamin gets offered work in better movies, and that Versluis' writing and directing improves - because both show promise and could have done better. So, unless, as some of us do, you have an inexplicable attraction to B-movies, I advise you to skip this movie and look for a better horror film - about one in 10 of 2015's horror films were watchable, which is a fairly good rate.