Director: Eric Nicholas

Cast: Ana Claudia Talancon, Colin Hanks, Jordana Spiro

Synopsis: In Los Angeles, the psychopath Doug stalks the sexy Latin woman Amy in a park and follows her. Later he breaks into her apartment and bugs it with surveillance cameras, learning her taste …

Low-budget flick Alone with Her starts with a startling quotation by some guy in the US department of justice stating that every minute 3 people become the victim of stalkers. When you extrapolate this piece of information, this means that half America’s population will have been stalked by 2018, and that the stalkers should, by 2019 find themselves becoming the victims of their own stalkers. Talk about a voyeuristic society: everyone will be sitting around watching people sitting around watching people sitting around…

Anyway, Eric Nicholas has come up with a reasonably original idea by having his story told entirely through the lenses of the various cameras and devices with which vaguely creepy loner Doug (Colin Hanks) spies on the newly single Amy (Ana Claudia Talancon). It’s a technique that doesn’t look too promising initially, but once Doug has installed his camera in Amy’s flat and used the information he learns from watching her 24/7 to worm his way into her affections, things become more interesting. Nicholas wisely avoids most of the genre cliches as he concentrates on portraying the hesitant development of a realistic relationship within a somewhat improbable situation. Strangely, it’s the relatively subdued narrative and fly-on-the-wall style that provides one of the film’s strengths by firmly anchoring the story in a recognisable world, and also its major weakness in the way that the technique restrains the dramatic elements necessary to keep the viewer completely involved.

Overall, though, I quite liked Alone with Her. The acting was fairly solid and believably naturalistic, and only occasionally does an unlikely angle or shot yank you from the story. Nicholas should be applauded for coming up with a relatively fresh way of telling a familiar tale, even if he doesn’t quite pull things off with complete success.