Leave it up to an indie writer-director to inject some fresh blood into the horror genre. At a time when the entire scene seems mired in a PG-13 slump of remakes and plenty of copycat torture porn flicks, along comes newcomer Roger Scheck with the inspired Nobody Loves Alice, an intense, harrowing film that’s sure to leave viewers with something to think about concerning what they just saw.
An extremely low-budget film that doesn’t quite feel low-budget, Nobody Loves Alice is the tale of an un-loved young woman who will do anything to capture her ideal fairy tale dream. Caught up in the middle of it is poor Abigail, who, in a moment of weakness, decides to test her fiance Alex’s fidelity by asking Alice to pose as an admirer of Alex to see how he reacts. Wise to Abigail’s scheme, Alex plays along, only to get caught up in Alice’s web of love, leaving Abigail to try and rescue him – or what’s left of him – from Alice’s clutches. Pretty much a first-timer for everyone involved, Nobody Loves Alice doesn’t suffer for it. Shot over twelve days on digital video, with a suitably bare soundtrack, Nobody Loves Alice features Nitzan Mager in the title role. Awkwardly beautiful and beautifully awkward, her Alice conveys, with a simple look, a character haunted by her past and at odds with reality, frightening and sad all at once. Even in her misguided ways, it’s hard not to feel pangs of sympathy for the character. Without using any additional or artificial lighting, writer/director Roger Scheck manages to convey the many moods of the characters, including a humorous yet gruesome scene involving a private investigator’s inquisition of Alice at her apartment, proving that one needn’t have a huge budget to create intense scenes and a compelling film.
Nobody Loves Alice is being released on DVD today by Indie-Pictures, a company whose goal is to support independent filmmakers, creating opportunities for them to have their films distributed where they might not have had that opportunity before. Nobody Loves Alice is definitely a film that deserves to be seen, at least by the built-in horror audience, and it’s refreshing that companies like Indie-Pictures exist to support these types of projects that would sadly not get any exposure otherwise.
