I Think We’re Alone Now
Directed by Reed Morano
Written by Mike Makowsky
Produced by Fred Berger, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Fernando Loureiro, Roberto Vasconcellos, Peter Dinklage, Mike Makowsky
Starring Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, Paul Giamatti, Charlotte Gainsbourg
One Tuesday afternoon, everyone on Earth dropped dead. For Del (Dinklage) this is mildly annoying. All those bodies around mean that his routine as a librarian is going to be interrupted, not just by nobody coming in to check out books, but because he’ll have to dispose of the corpses in a neat and orderly manner in so as to keep the neighborhood fresh and clean. Del loves order, you see. So he spends his time going from house to house, wrapping the former inhabitants up and hauling them out to his truck and taking them to a graveyard he has created with a skip loader, one that he has obviously been planting corpses in for quite some time. He dumps the bodies in pre-dug holes with absolutely no ceremony or emotion. Then he returns to their homes and cleans, scavenging batteries and other non-perishable items. He is careful and methodical about this, and the nature of his hobby doesn’t seem to affect him. It’s not like Del was on a first name basis with humanity.
Director Morano likes to have his character silhouetted against bright lights, or in a gauzy haze, adding to the sense of remoteness and alienation.
Then one night he is awakened by fireworks. He is in disbelief, convinced that he was the only living person in the world.
In the morning he sets out to find out who lit off the rockets, only to find Grace (Fanning) a twenty-something blonde, in a wrecked car, obviously sleeping it off. He takes her back to the library, patches her up, and waits for her to wake up.
Grace, it turns out, is vivacious, caring, extroverted, cheerful, and basically a happy, well adjusted person. Everything Del is not. Not long after he reluctantly teams up with her, she finds and brings home a small dog. How cute is that? Now, granted, Grace has an interesting background story of her own. The dog was probably smart to get the hell out of there.
Normally in this sort of movie, Grace would slowly chip away at the ice surrounding Del’s barren soul, awakening a warm and involved person and eventually falling in love and repopulating the world.
Excuse me. Did I forget to mention this was Peter Dinklage? It’s not that sort of movie. In fact, things get decidedly weird and more than a little bleak. For instance, it doesn’t end well for the dog, who has a handle on Del and bites him.
The stolid lack of emoting in the movie isn’t from any lack of acting talent by Dinklage or Fanning, but from the fact that the story is beautifully understated, as spare and dark as an Agnes Obel piece. The audience is kept at arm’s length throughout, which, given the nature of the characters and the story, is the only way it can work.
You want a flick where the couple nobly and resolutely rise above the deprivations and solitude and march boldly forward, humanity’s last gleaming hope? Then this movie isn’t for you.
If you want one that leaves you puzzling out the intricacies of human behavior and finding hidden depths behind blank faces, then this is a superior work of art.
Now on Amazon Prime.