The American post-apocalyptic drama “I Think We’re Alone Now” tells about the events that occurred after the mysterious death of almost all people on Earth. The surviving outcast dwarf Del began a new happy lonely life. He created an ideal world for himself, which was violated by another surviving person – the girl Grace.
During the Sundance Film Festival, the director of this modest chamber film, Reed Morano, was awarded a special prize for artistic merit.
What is ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ about?
The American drama shows the post-apocalyptic world. Almost all people died at the same time. The cause of their death is not given in the film. The life of the surviving dwarf Del goes on as usual. While going around all the houses in a small provincial town, he is collecting batteries (the most valuable thing left from people) and burying the bodies. In the evenings, Del drinks wine and eats fresh fish. A lonely man entertains himself by watching silent comedies starring Harold Lloyd.
The main business of Del’s life is the city library. He continues to catalog books. He has a map on which the dwarf marks the buildings he has checked. The misanthrope enjoys solitude and is quite content with his life.
One night, the man heard loud noises, as if someone had set off fireworks. In the morning he found a car with a girl, Grace. After the accident, she lost consciousness. The dwarf dragged her to his house. When the girl woke up, she told him about the death of her parents in another city. Del’s new acquaintance regained her strength and her savior suggested that the girl leave his city, as he liked loneliness. But she begged Del to give her asylum. The man agreed, but on condition that the girl passed the probationary period.
The librarian and the new townswoman jointly took care of cleaning the houses that were not treated by a man and burying the bodies. Once a girl came to Del with a dog that had bitten a librarian. The man released the animal while Grace was sleeping.
In his greenhouses, the dwarf grows seedlings. He noticed that the girl’s neck contained a scar that Grace had hidden from the man. Once the young lady was in a good mood and even kissed the librarian.
In the morning, Del was woken up by voices coming from downstairs. He went downstairs and saw a girl with two other people – Violet and Patrick. They said that Grace is their daughter. From strangers, Del learned about other survivors living in neighboring towns. Violet and Patrick were on their way to California, where a gathering of all the surviving inhabitants of America was to take place. The guests invited the librarian to join them, but Del refused. The girl also does not plan to leave him, but the parents nevertheless took their daughter away. The dwarf noticed that Grace’s mother’s neck contained the same scar as the girl’s.
The librarian was left alone again. One day he got bored and decided to go in search of Grace. In the book, the man found Patrick’s entry with the address of his family’s residence. Del went on the road.
The librarian came to a city full of people. At night, the man ended up in the house where Patrick lives. He saw a lying girl, who was entangled with wires. Some of them were attached to the top of the head.
Del freed Grace. When they left the house, Patrick came out to meet them, who explained that traumatic memories prevent people from living a normal life. He managed to develop a technology to erase the past from the brain of any person.
The girl grabbed a revolver and shot at her tormentor, and Violet confessed to the loss of her real daughter. The main characters of the film left the city, where happy people remained to live, not remembering their past.
The Meaning of “I Think We’re Alone Now”
Post-apocalyptic films are made in a variety of genres. Such a movie may be a melodrama, a thriller, a political pamphlet, a philosophical statement, or a mixture of several genres. The film “I Think We’re Alone Now” tells about the death of human civilization. The apocalypse occurred for some abstract reasons that the creators of the drama did not explain to the audience. Under these conditions, two completely different people met. At first, plot twists of the film are built on their relationship. Del, in fact, was the orderly of the city, its keeper, and after the appearance of Grace, the man’s life changed. He tried to make sense of what was happening.
The shock of the apocalypse is behind us. There is no strength for panic and a desperate struggle for survival. All that was left was the emptiness around. There was a spiritual death of the main characters of the film. Every little thing from a normal past brings them incredible joy. But Del does not want to share this happiness with anyone. After the appearance of the girl, he became uncomfortable. Grace does not leave him alone, chasing the librarian everywhere. He does not like the wrong arrangement of books on the shelf, which Grace decided to clean up. She has a lot of clothes and never closes her mouth.
A blond teenage girl has a dog. She goes crazy while listening to hard rock. Naughty Grace enjoys little holidays that annoy Del. She hides something from the librarian, for example, the reason for her appearance in this city. Before meeting Grace, a closed dwarf could be called a man-state. He lived by his own rules. He had a mission to preserve the cultural heritage of mankind. Two opposites crossed and it turned out that they need each other, despite their fundamental differences.
The film shows the compromises that form a society and all the delights of a dystopian world through the eyes of the main characters in the brilliant performance of Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning. The director studies their characters, turning the life of Del and Grace inside out. A man who has closed himself off from the world becomes attached to a girl whom the same world has rejected.
Explanation of the ending of the movie “I Think We’re Alone Now”
About 2/3 of the post-apocalyptic drama is devoted to the life and life of Del and Grace. By genre, this part of the film is a silent chamber melodrama. Towards the end, the film becomes a detective thriller with elements of an aesthetic road movie, with California chic as a backdrop.
In the last third of the post-apocalyptic drama, its creator tried to pay less attention to dystopia. This part of the picture shows how a new world develops in Del’s brain, which preferred its hierarchical structure, as a closed system where terminal loneliness prevails. Almost every post-apocalyptic film explores this feeling. When there is no society, man needs both objects and people.
Reed Morano’s hermetic plot concept collapses by the end of the film. A pair of heroes suddenly turns into a quartet. If at the beginning of the film the director was engaged in the study of loneliness, then at the end the film turned into a thriller, the heroes of which were psychos. The result was a kind of indie fantasy with ornate arguments about the living dead, a kind of prequel to some multi-part project about zombies. The appearance of psychos Violet and Patrick led to the emergence of other conflicts and took the plot in the opposite direction from the study of human loneliness.
