- Director: David Moreau
- Writer: Jon Goldman, David Moreau
- Stars: Olga Kurylenko, Jean Schatz, Lola Bonaventure
REVIEW
Returning to your childhood home after the death of a parent is never going to be a fun experience, but some people definitely have it worse than others and Alice is one of them. Living a carefree life in the city, she has, mostly, managed to leave her traumatic upbringing behind, but when her mother suffers an unusual and untimely death, she must return home and face a multitude of long buried memories.
A cold open utilizes a masked stranger giving a quick exposition on the fact that Elena (Alice’s mom) lives in an isolated home in a forest where people have gone missing only to have their corpses later be found with their faces missing. In fact, the absence of faces is a through line in this film. While Alice’s beauty is always on display, all other faces are obstructed from view in various ways. As Alice (Olga Kurylenko) rummages through the relics of her teenage years, writer/director David Moreau shows off his stylistic side, utilizing artsy lighting and angles: these moments are fun and lighthearted, but they also hint at the underlying unhappiness Alice felt growing up and when she opens a cabinet full of VHS tapes, we learn where the unhappiness comes from.
Elena was a strict, rigid parent who wanted to use Alice’s beauty as a way for her to have a wealthy and successful life: happiness was not also on that list. As Alice rambles about this home that is heavily armed and surveilled, we begin to see the larger picture of her relationship with her mother and we also have more and more questions about who, or what, else is living on this compound with her.
With various shades of Eyes Without a Face and a little bit of The Skin I Live In, Other is a much more emotionally based film than Moreau’s previous outings and, unfortunately, this is a bit of a letdown simply because the film, itself, seems unsure if it’s a meditation on a traumatic childhood, or if it’s a home invasion film. Having more than proven himself in the home invasion genre with Them, these are the bits that outshine the melancholier ones. When the big reveal finally happens, this is when the movie would really get interesting, but sadly, this is when it ends. Visually engaging with a very clever auditory gag, Other is an earnest story about mothers, daughters and grief that could have been so much more impactful if it had leaned a bit more into the horror aspects of the story.
Available on Shudder October 17
Lisa Fremont
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