As far as I can tell from my extensive research (10 minutes on IMDb), this is the first movie in which Lucy Benjamin has appeared. She is more well known in the UK for her role as Lisa Fowler in the soap opera Eastenders ('oy mate, you been shafting my sister, innit?' etc.). She has also acted in other British TV soaps, sitcoms and series. She is a reasonably good actress, so I don't think the blame can be laid on her for this stonker of a movie. Instead, I think we have to point a finger (or two) at director/writer Tristan Versluis. He has also directed a handful of other movies, but his main involvement in movies and TV series has been for make-up, including top-rating shows like Game of Thrones. Anyways, Not Alone (a.k.a. 'The Haunting of Ellie Rose') is badly written and poorly directed. It is predictable and clichéd, and, apart (possibly) from the main role, seriously lacks character development - as we all know, if you can't empathize with any of the main characters, a movie will not hold your attention or stir your emotions (for instance, horror films are supposed to be scary...). On the positive side, some of the photography and filming is very good quality, but the low budget is clearly reflected in the limited locations, poor costuming, limited soundtrack, and dodgy 'special effects'. Versluis does well in the make-up department (where his experience lies) - Ellie Rose's broken wrist is gruesomely real, as are the dead bodies sitting around the kitchen table. But somewhere around the start of the third and final stage of this movie, the viewer begins to realize that there are no surprising twists in store, and that they have just wasted 80 minutes of their life. Let's hope Lucy Benjamin gets offered work in better movies, and that Versluis' writing and directing improves - because both show promise and could have done better. So, unless, as some of us do, you have an inexplicable attraction to B-movies, I advise you to skip this movie and look for a better horror film - about one in 10 of 2015's horror films were watchable, which is a fairly good rate.
Review of The Haunting of Ellie Rose
