Goran Stolevski’s “You Won’t Be Alone” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival yesterday. Most of the well-known outlets have published their reviews, which are very positive, including a 5-star-review from The Guardian and being called “Among the Best Horror Debuts in Years” by IndieWire. Throughoutthose reviews, we learn more about the film’s story beyond the synopsis and about Noomi’s role,which is part of an ensemble and not the focal point, despite her being prominently featured in the advertisments. Here’s a collection of excerpts with links to the full reviews.

The Hollywood Reporter, John Defore (January 22, 2022)
Noomi Rapace is listed first in fest catalog credits and featured prominently in key art, but she’s just one of a few actors playing the role, and gets far from the most screen time. We meet the witch as an ordinary human infant, recently born to an angry woman in a 19th-century Macedonian village. The mother is visited by a frightening figure whose body is covered in scars — sometimes called a “wolf-eateress,” she is known in local lore as Old Maid Maria. She wants to take the baby.

Variety, Peter Debruge (January 22, 2022)
A veteran shorts director who brings years of experimentation and experience to his boldly unconventional feature debut, Stolevski has crafted a lyrical cinematic folktale. The language and setting are unfamiliar – a 19th-century Balkan village, where people speak in a half-forgotten local dialect – but there’s a clear narrative logic to it all, even if the first time through, audiences may as well accept they won’t get everything about the plot. For those who don’t mind a bit of a challenge, “You Won’t Be Alone” feels like what we might get if A24 commissioned an art-house horror movie from “The Tree of Life” director Terrence Malick. The film’s last act brings everything full circle in a way that should satisfy both horror and art-house audiences, but then the movie, like its protagonist, is never content to be just one thing.

Netflix has revealed the release date for the Swedish-language movie “Black Crab.” Starring Noomi Rapace, the action-thriller will release on March 18 on Netflix, worldwide. Set in a post-apocalyptic world torn apart by climate change and war, “Black Crab” follows six soldiers on a desperate mission to bring an end to the war, which has ruined their lives. During a never-ending winter, six soldiers are assigned on a dangerous journey across the frozen sea to deliver a mystery package that could bring the war to an end. They have no idea what dangers await them as they approach hostile enemy territory or who, if anyone, they can trust. But for speed skater turned soldier Caroline Edh, the mission is about something else entirely. The film also stars Jakob Oftebro, Erik Enge, Dar Salim, Ardalan Esmaili, Aliette Opheim, and David Dencik. Below are the first look images shared by Netflix.

The last update of the year comes with many Christmas and Holiday wishes for all visitors of Noomi Rapace Online. Lisbeth Salander is the first role most of us saw Noomi perform. I saw the film in the theatre back in the day, not knowing what it was about, and I was hooked by Noomi’s performance the moment she appeared on screen. Alas, the fansite was created shortly after. So now, a good 11 years after opening Noomi Rapace Online, we are in full circle with all three “Millennium” films re-capped in wonderful high definition for your enjoyment. If you’re still planning on a film series to watch over the Christmas holidays, I can only recommend them – or the even longer extended television episodes that gave more weight to the story and to Lisbeth’s and Mikael’s relationship. The video archive has been updated as well with international trailers, making ofs and film clips. Everybody, have a good and healthy time and a good start into 2022.

In her second collaboration with director Tommy Wirkola after 2017’s “What Happened to Monday?”, Noomi Rapace is given “only” one character to play, but this one has all the rage. In “The Trip”, Rapace plays Lisa, a moderately unsuccesful actress, 2ho heads to a remote cabin with her husband Lars, a moderately successful tv producer, who has planned the trip to kill his wife during the weekend trip. Coincidentally, Lisa has planned just the same fate for her husband. Their mutual blood bath turns into a group affair when some unexpected outsiders, including three escaped convicts, join the fray. Tommy Wirkola’s trip is everything you expect (bloody, funny, outrageous) and then some. Clearly one of Noomi’s most entertaining films of the last couple of years. Screencaptures from the Blu-Ray as well as its making of featurette have been added to the photo gallery. Next week: An early Christmas surprise for you :-)

Noomi’s upcoming film “You Won’t Be Alone” will celebrate its world-premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2022, before its theatrical release on January 28, 2022 in the United States.

In an isolated mountain village in 19th-century Macedonia, a young girl is taken from her mother and transformed into a witch by an ancient, shape-shifting spirit. Left to wander feral, the young witch beholds the natural world with curiosity and wonder. After inadvertently killing a villager and assuming her body, she continues to inhabit different people, living among the villagers for years, observing and mimicking their behavior until the ancient spirit returns, bringing them full circle.

The debut feature of Australian-Macedonian writer-director Goran Stolevski, You Won’t Be Alone is wonderfully unlike any witch film you’ve seen. Its striking artistry and aestheticism blends supernatural horror (there’s no shortage of blood and entrails) with poetic fable, yielding a sensory meditation on life that is unexpectedly emotional and profoundly humanistic. Even the malevolent ancient spirit, born of suffering and loneliness, is a contoured character. And the young witch (played by multiple actors, including Noomi Rapace, Alice Englert, Carloto Cotta, and Sara Klimoska) suggests a transcendent spirit who, across successive lives – woman, man, mother, child – experiences what it means to be human.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Noomi Rapace and director Valdimar Jóhannsson participated in a comprehensive media tour in the United Kingdom to promote Friday’s theatrical release of “Lamb”. There were various screenings and Q&As for the film throughout London. Pictures from all events have been added to the photo gallery.

Then, Noomi participated in two separate press junkets for the film. Clips from both, as well as a clip from the Q&A at the British Film Institute have been added to the video archive. Check the list below for a complete list of updates. Enjoy.

Another fantastic interview with Noomi’s in yesterday’s i Newspaper: For a few years when she was growing up in Iceland, Noomi Rapace lived on a farm, but she was too young to get involved with any of the day-to-day labour. So when, on her first day on the set of her new film, Lamb, she had to drive a tractor and deliver a lamb, it was something of a baptism of fire. “I knew I could not f**k up,” she tells me over coffee in a London hotel. “But I didn’t have a lot of adrenaline. There was a strange calmness.” Still, her foray into midwifery left its mark. “The weirdest thing was the very specific smell. It just wouldn’t wash off. It stayed for a week or something.” The Icelandic film, directed by first-timer Valdimar Jóhannsson, was the break-out hit at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Rapace, 41, plays a woman caught between two brothers, who loosely resemble Cain and Abel: she’s married to one and had previously been involved with the other. It is not the only biblical element to the tale; her character is called Maria, after all. When the childless couple discover a newborn in their barn, they are so excited that they fail to notice there is something odd about it – namely that it is half-lamb, half-human. The complete interview can be read over at i News – here’s Noomi’s quote on the recently wrapped “Django”, which will span over ten episodes:

I wanted to take a break. I had a Skype call with the director and writers who wanted to create a role. Then Nicholas Pinnock texted me for a coffee and I took him to work out with me in a climbing class. As we were leaving, he tells another friend: ‘I’m off to Romania tomorrow and Noomi’s going to play my sister’. And I thought: ‘I haven’t said yes yet’. The character is the most beautiful, brutal villain. I dream about her. I told the writers this, and some of my dreams have become part of the script. I have accepted imperfections and allowed myself to feel sadness, vulnerability and weakness. That’s not weakness. I was raised in a way never to cry, never show weakness. So I became very tough. I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to accept that way of living, and carrying myself, to bleed into my son’s life. I want him to be a human that has access to all emotions, where everything is allowed.

Noomi is featured in the recent international issue of The wrap Magazine, with an interview that can be read on their website as well: Noomi Rapace was sitting waiting for “the knock” on her trailer door, a sign that a mother sheep was ready to deliver a baby. She had just traveled hours to a small Icelandic village to film a movie about a hybrid lamb-human baby for six months and no money. And all her training didn’t prepare her for having to birth this little miracle on her first day of filming. “I was running down to the barn, and they were like, ‘The lamb is coming!’ OK, I’m just sticking my hands in here! I guess this is what we’re doing,” Rapace said. “It was the birth of the movie that kicked off everything, but from that point there was no return. I was just in it.” The emotional connection she formed in that moment carried through to her performance in Valdimar Jóhannsson’s “Lamb,” Iceland’s Oscar entry and a movie about coping with loss and how we go to extreme lengths to maintain a sense of normalcy. Rapace had been itching to return to art-house cinema and felt the “fragile” and “personal” story at its center was something she’d been waiting for “my entire life.” “I always need to bring it back to myself and find situations or periods in my life like an emotional mirror so I can dig into myself,” Rapace said. “I did go to places where it was really painful to be, of loss and heartbreak. How do you find your way back into life when you’re broke?” The complete interview can be read here.

In 2010’s “The Secrets we Keep”, Noomi Rapace – with a cigarette glued to her hand – plays a persecuted Romani with a traumatizing past, living an All-American life as a 1950’s housewife, when she suddenly sees the man she believes killed her sister during World War II. She kidnaps him, hides him in the family basement and tries to get a confession out of him. All the while, she cannot even convince her husband that two strangers who met at the end of the world end up in the same little town in America. “The Secrets We Keep” plays out like a four-person-play in a claustrophobic basement, but it can’t keep the pace and suspense the story needs. Much like last week’s “Angel of Mine”, the story’s premise allows only two ways to end, so there’s not much of a surprise to its climax. Still, it’s a good watch, so make sure to look out for it on your streaming device. Screencaptures from the Blu-Ray have been added to the photo gallery. Next Sunday will bring us yet another basement story with Tommy Wirkola’s “The Trip”.

This Sunday, we cover “Angel of Mine”, a 2019 release and a remake of a French film with Noomi Rapace playing a woman who’s certain that a girl from the neighborhood is her own daughter, which she lost days after giving birth in a hospital fire. Is she right or is she losing her mind? In this thriller-by-the-numbers, the answer is as clear as it is predictable. While its watchable, it ticks every box of the “maternal instincts” thriller along the way. You can’t blame its director or the actors, because there isn’t a much better film within this story. It’s an OK watch for a Sunday afternoon, but for a decent film evening I’d recommend any of those films that inspired “Angel of Mine”. Next week: The Secrets We Keep.