High school student Sumiko jumped off a bridge on account of a certain incident, but failed in her attempt to kill herself. Having escaped the grips of death, she returns to school a few months later and soon begins terrorizing her classmate and childhood friend, Hideaki, upon learning he is secretly dating one of the teachers at their school. As Sumiko continues to antagonize and rebuff others, her actions steadily escalate…all for the sake of sustaining her own sense of peril.

Director Nakagawa Natsuki graduated from the College of Arts, Rikkyo University and went to study filmmaking at the New Cinema Workshop. She then returned to Rikkyo enrolling in the Graduate Program in Body Expression and Cinematic Arts, Graduate School of Contemporary Psychology. Thereafter she entered the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts [TUA hereafter]. Though her school history suggests a constant academic pursuit of cinema, in truth the reason for her traversal through various programs was far more pragmatic. In an interview with SKIP City (where She Is Alone world premiered) she admitted she was just “[…] seeking out situations which would let me make a movie….” Ironically, She Is Alone ended up being almost entirely an independent production. Most surprising of all is her revelation the initial draft she wrote was a horror movie. A fan of the genre, she felt she had yet to see a type of movie in which a young girl becomes gripped with anger and acts irrationally. So she tried to write such a movie. However, it was deemed stylistically sound but ultimately hollow by her instructor at TUA. It was not until she began injecting her own personal emotions and thoughts into the story did the script become more than an exercise in style as evidenced by its receipt of the SKIP City Award. Though Nakagawa may have taken a longer road to fulfilling her debut, the experience is certainly informing her filmmaking with promising results. Her short film Projection (2017), produced as a class assignment at TUA, was selected to the Fajr International Film Festival. She also recently completed her TUA graduate project Yoru no Soto (lit. Outside at Night) which also looks quite intriguing. Meanwhile, She Is Alone made its international premiere at the 2019 Nippon Connection where overseas audiences are sure to have taken notice of this promising new filmmaker.