Alone Time
2013 · 13m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Rod Blackhurst
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young woman, stressed by busy and continually crowded New York, suddenly decides to retreat to the depths of a solitary lake in the Adirondacks.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A woman runs away to a lake—sounds like every yoga retreat commercial ever made, which is exactly why Blackhurst's commitment to *actually* sitting with silence instead of scoring it into epiphany feels like a quiet middle finger to the wellness industrial complex.
Blackhurst positions this within a lineage of American introspection cinema—Thoreau-adjacent, formally austere—where the landscape itself becomes the antagonist rather than the redemptive mirror most filmmakers would lazily default to.
The film's genius lives in its refusal to cut away from boredom: there's a specific rhythm to how long Blackhurst holds on mundane actions (loading a canoe, sitting on a dock) that transforms them into an almost meditative endurance test, and that patience is what makes the retreat feel earned rather than escapist.