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Alone With Her

Single women living alone who are at all nervous about—well, about anything are advised to approach Alone With Her with care, unless you really feel a need to get some extra paranoia into your life. Inspired by the proliferation of cheap, easily available spy cameras, writer/director Eric Nicholas’s independent thriller follows the machinations of a stalker, Doug (Colin Hanks, son of Tom) as he preys on a young woman named Amy (Ana Claudia Talancón of Fast Food Nation). The twist that sets this apart is that everything we see in the film is from the perspective of one of Doug’s hidden cameras. We watch as he hides a camera in his clothing and spies on women at the beach, and then as he watches Amy on his home computer via cameras hidden in her kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. The creepiest parts of the story show him using information he has obtained from his spying when he strikes up a conversation with her at a local coffee shop—mentioning an obscure band she likes, carrying a DVD of a movie he knows she watched and enjoyed, etc. Despite the experimental shooting style, the story is relatively unadventurous, which you may find a good thing: an indie film on this subject could easily become too difficult to watch, especially if it wants to explore the inherent nature of movie viewing as a form of voyeurism. As is, Alone With Her is a smart, unsettling drama that finds new uses for tatics devised by movies like The Stepfather and The Blair Witch Project.