Metacritic reviews

Alone is exactly what it sells — a taut, hot-wired survival thriller. With its gaunt storytelling, meaty characters, and high-stakes action, the film delivers on all fronts.

Accomplished in all its tech and design departments, Alone is easily the best of several recent hunted-woman-in-the-wilderness films, including fellow indies “Ravage” and “Range Runners” as well as the flashier French “Revenge.” It doesn’t necessarily need the structural gimmickry of onscreen “chapter” titles (“The Road,” “The Rain,” etc.), but that’s a minor quibble.

Alone proves a highly effective genre exercise.

John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.

There’s something deeply appealing about an already stripped-down cat-and-mouse scenario that becomes dirtier and more elemental as it goes along, tracing a devolutionary arc from the rules of the road to primeval combat.

This minimalist survival thriller unfolds with such elegant simplicity and single-minded momentum that its irritations are easily excused.

The sense of true wilderness is amplified by sound mixers Morgan Hobart and Brian Mazzola, who deploy bug rattles and rain splatters like weapons, building in the diegetic sound of nature so that the odd moments of silence are truly oppressive and menacing.

Alone still takes a simple premise and smacks us around with it for 95 reasonably suspenseful, thrilling minutes. And that’s enough.

Alone gives us little reason to care if our hero makes it out alive, but I have to give credit where it’s due: Jessica isn’t written as some damsel in distress. Though she does make a questionable choice or two, she’s more crafty and engaged than a standard victim.