Alone

 I'd joke that you could call this one Incidents On and Off a Mountain Road, to honor the great Coscarelli, but there's no mountain here. Also it gets a little more Off action than you'd expect. Also also, the joke barely makes sense- it's just a reference. In any case, don't hold that against Alone, it's a good movie.

  Jessica (Jules Wilcox) is introduced playing storage Tetris in a small U-Haul tow trailer and leaving town in her car. After some driving on scenic Oregon backroads, she picks up a tail: some dude in a black Jeep (Marc Menchaca) who by way of introduction almost makes her get into a head-on collision with a truck. He then keeps messing with her in an obviously threatening way that he could just blow off as a misunderstanding whenever they run into each other. And they do keep running into each other: in the road, at the motel she stays in overnight, at a rest stop... You get to know the sound of the Jeep's engine, and the movie uses it as if it were the Jaws theme.

 This first half hour is the movie at its best: the filmmaking is tight as hell, the storytelling is economical, and the stalker oozes menace. There are a lot of interesting, technically well-made scenes - I particularly liked the showiest one, where the activities of a few bystanders at the rest stop are tracked while keeping Jessica firmly in the shot, out of focus. A great way to convey her mental state.

 Then the stalker turns into an abductor, and the movie switches tack a couple of times; It's divided into titled chapters, each one of them giving the action its own spin. It's cool in that it bucks expectations, a little - only a little it's always variations on a theme after all. But the latter chapters unfortunately lack the invention of the first one, and they're not nearly as lean, either. Even at a hundred minutes it feels like there's a little too much flab to some of these episodes.

 But Alone remains an expertly crafted thriller even when it's not at its best, and an excellently brutal action climax does make it go down easy.

 The acting is pretty great; Menchaca is enjoyably despicable and Willcox gives a lot of personality to a character that spends most of her time being terrorized. While we do get a little glimpse into the duo's internal life, I wouldn't say the dramatic aspects add a whole lot to the movie. But they do give it some flavour, and some of it is used in a very satisfying way in the finale.

 I'm less enthused with some of the contrivances the script uses and abuses to keep the action going. Most egregious is the stalker's magical homing murderbeacon: It's a bit dodgy how he always seems to find Jessica while they're both driving, but I was willing to give that a pass since he could just know the area really well (and he admits to as much.) But later, when they keep finding each other across acres and acres of woodland? Oh, come the fuck on. There isn't even a bullshitty scene of the stalker looking at cracked branches or something. He just keeps finding her, like some sort of deadly Pepe le Péw.
 And this is yet another movie where people don't lock their phones or i-pads. Is that a thing? In any case, I also call pre-emptive shenanigans on that.

 Other than that the script, by Mattias Olson, is full of clever details; When it's not being lazy (see above), it's pretty well constructed. And since it's set in Oregon, we also get plenty of natural beauty (cinematographer: Federico Verardi). 

 The film is helmed by John Hyams, a criminally underrated director who's probably best known for making actually great late sequels to the cheesy Universal Soldier series. That this guy is still confined to VoD, as this movie shows, is a disgrace.