Panic Fest 2024: All Alone Together

Creative, engrossing, smartly scripted, and masterfully executed on a shoestring budget, “All Alone Together” is meta-movie magic at its best.

Being an artist can feel so isolating. There’s a kind of madness involved in creating that can make a person feel vulnerable, exposed, and disconnected from most of the world. The same inner demons that fuel creativity and artistic expression are the ones that make us prone to crippling self-doubt and relentless self-sabotage.

All Alone Together is a wickedly smart, wonderfully meta meditation on art and the tendency to put our demons on the page or the canvas or the screen to take away their power and give meaning to the madness.

Made on a microbudget of $15,000 acquired through fundraising and shot over 34 days with a crew of more than 70 University of Southern California (USC) students, All Alone Together is the brainchild of USC theater major Alex Nimrod, who says he wrote the film to personify his deepest fears and insecurities.

“I’m throwing myself into my worst nightmare to create something nauseatingly beautiful. This is a hyper-meta untold narrative, a horrifying wake-up-slap to lulled audiences of 21st-century horror.”

Nimrod, who also stars in the film, came up with the idea after writing the basis of the plot as a short film during his freshman year. His close friend, Maximus Jenkins, agreed to direct because of how personal of a story it was and how much it resonated with both him and Alex, stating, “We made this film in an effort to make us both feel less alone and hopefully help others feel the same, too.”

It begins with a bang before the opening credits roll.

We’re introduced to Tyler (played by fellow USC theater senior Jordan Rice), a lonely man living a mundane life, just trying to get by. One day, after suffering constant taunting and berating from a horrible co-worker, his anger gets the better of him, and his aggressive outburst costs him his job.

It turns out, however, that’s the least of his problems. Struggling with his past and tormented by regret, it seems his inner demons have manifested externally and are haunting him and terrorizing him… eventually killing him.

At the moment of Tyler’s bloody death, the camera zooms out, and it becomes clear we’ve been watching a film within a film.

The film we’ve been watching is the work of a young filmmaker, Lincoln (Nimrod). His debut film, Accompany, has just been screened at a local film festival. He’s landed a manager, Sloane Anderson (Elizabeth Hadjinian), and she’s wasted no time securing distribution for the film.

Though he remains in a bit of denial, Lincoln, who works as a school janitor to pay the bills, slowly realizes that he’s on the brink of real success — something he’s not all that comfortable with.

It doesn’t take long for us to realize what a deeply personal film Accompany is for Lincoln and how much of himself he put onto the screen. As the pressure mounts, Lincoln begins to be consumed by the characters from his film and finds himself haunted by the same darkness that haunted his fictional character, Tyler.

As Lincoln struggles to let go of his connection to the film, he finds it impossibly difficult. Soon, we realize why Lincoln is so tormented as the line between fiction and reality continues to blur.

Fantastic visuals, strong editing, and subtle but masterful details significantly enhance the tension and terror that escalates exponentially as the film reaches its devastating finale.

The film also boasts phenomenal makeup effects, especially given the budget, and a genuinely unnerving and nightmare-inducing design of Lincoln’s Haunting.

Nimrod, who carries most of the weight of the film on his shoulders, is riveting. He effectively conveys an uneasy level of intensity, anxiety, and paranoia — all leading to a heartbreaking descent into madness.

The ending left me absolutely gobsmacked.

It’s an ending that cleverly reveals the overarching theme of the film, striking a powerful emotional chord without sacrificing one iota of heart-pounding dread.

I love seeing an up-and-coming filmmaker make such a mark right out of the gate, and I love when artists put so much of their heart, soul, and vulnerability into their work. All Alone Together is a deeply personal work, and it shows. There’s a rawness and authenticity to Lincoln’s anguish that’s so resonant and relatable.

It’s a simple film but a damn effective one, especially for anyone who understands the passion and pain of creating and who understands what it’s like to feel lost and alone.

The tragedy of life is that we may ultimately all be alone, but we’re All Alone Together, and there’s tremendous comfort in that. Kudos to Nimrod and Jenkins for bringing the humanity out of horror.