I Will Never Leave You Alone (2023)

"Grim Japanese-Style Ghost Story"

American film-maker D W Medoff's low budget modern-day ghost story is getting a Blu-ray release from Arrow Films.

Richard Marwood (Kenneth Trujillo) is in prison on a sentence of involuntary manslaughter. He is offered a chance of parole on one condition: he has to stay in an abandoned house for a week and rid it of the ghosts that may or may not be haunting it. If he leaves the house he breaks his parole. 

So of course he agrees, and of course there is (at least one) ghost, but which is scarier: the restless spirit or the memories he has of the terrible thing that happened to the rest of his family, as a result of which he is now unable to speak?

It would spoil things to give too much more away, suffice to say that this setup could go any number of ways and Medoff elects for one of the grim ones, so be warned. Otherwise this is definitely what is known today as a slow burn of a movie, with its hints of a vengeful ghost suggesting influences by Japanese horrors such as THE GRUDGE. 

Admittedly there are a number of ideas here that are a bit difficult to swallow, one being that an American estate agent would actually specialise in 'house ghost clearing' which their Chinese clients are insisting on, and the other being that apparently a number of candidates have already tried and haven't been able to spend more than a couple of nights in the house. Would anyone in a position of authority really think of sending a traumatised prisoner into such an environment? And the final scene, while presumably intended to be the most disturbing of all, pushes everything in the direction of being ultimately a little bit silly.

Photography is crisp and, unfortunately, high definition enough to render effects and makeups rather less effective than they might otherwise have been. This is exactly the kind of film that needs to be in grainy 16mm with darker lighting to allow the viewer's imagination to fill in the gaps rather than what we get here. 

Extras include an interview with the writer-director (24 minutes) and commentary from him for a selected 23 minutes of footage (it's all together so you don't have to search through the film) and three D W Medoff shorts - AWOL, I'm Down Here and Yahrzeit. Each is about six minutes long and feel like mini anthology movie segments or comic book stories, each atmospheric and leading to a decent conclusion. 

D W Medoff's I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU ALONE is out on Blu-ray from Arrow on Monday 5th May 2025