After her mother is brutally murdered, Alice (Olga Kurylenko) must revisit her childhood home and confront her traumatic adolescence. As some new threats lurk behind her, a gory and grueling quest to survive follows.
A horror maverick returns. French filmmaker David Moreau has been in the horror game for quite some time with 2006 home invasion thriller Them and the so-so Hollywood remake of the Hong Kong supernatural classic The Eye. But it was only last year with the Shudder original Mads that Moreau upped his game, filming a zombie nightmare all in one take. Expectations were naturally high when the Frenchman began work on yet another film for Shudder, this one ominously titled Other and echoing the claustrophobic air of his previous films.
An intensely engaging but painful descent into madness. If one-take filming was the trick in his last film, Moreau here focuses on facelessness. Barring the tragic heroine Alice (an attention-grabbingly committed Olga Kurylenko), everyone else in the film is blurred out of vision or conveniently masked. What seems like a gimmick at first turns out to be quite an effective device in isolating Alice in a hellhole she yearned to escape all this time. Through grainy VHS tapes and hallucinatory soundscapes, she revisits the trauma and abuse her authoritative mother subjected her teenage self to. Memories of Black Swan and last year’s The Substance are triggered as we see Alice’s diets and stomach size being monitored to every teeny tiny bit. Cut off from human civilisation in her mother’s sleek but desolate forest home with an entity stalking her in the dark, crawling towards her on all fours. Is that night terror an actual beast or a manifestation of her turbulent past? Both answers can draw tired sighs and overdone tropes, given how every post-A24 horror strives to “elevate” itself these days with morose family pains. But in Moreau’s hands, Other succeeds as a thrilling nail-biter, balancing Alice’s lifelong scars with fresh wounds.
The pacing can be uneven, but the payoff suffices. Sometimes, running in the woods and flashlight-illuminated walks through dark stairways can get tiring and repetitive. And with a protagonist so broken and burdened, you can’t help but wish for her to catch a breath without all the stealthy jump scares and guttural sound design forced upon her. Unlike Mads, Other suffers from pacing issues, losing track of its deep-seated traumas for quick genre tricks. But by the time the third act reveals itself, Other emerges as a well-executed and well-balanced psychological trip. With the inconsistent stew of pain, abuse, gore, and survivalism that Moreau cooks up, it’s still impressive to see how he doesn’t end up with a preachy tale of motherhood or a shlocky blood-bursting finale. Instead, he breadcrumbs the audience by leading them to a satisfying open-ended conclusion, one that’s only humanized further by the leading lady’s piercing gaze. You might remember Olga Kurylenko as the masked villain Taskmaster in Marvel films like Black Widow and Thunderbolts* or as Bond girl Camille Montes in Quantum of Solace. But it’s in Other where she truly shines, showcasing her full emotional range away from the constraints of pre-existing IPs. While Moreau continues his genre experiments, the French Ukrainian actress proves her mettle as horror’s “next scream queen/final girl”.
A moving trauma tale with effective shockers that thankfully doesn’t overdo the torture.
