French genre director David Moreau has achieved great things with confined settings, like in his excellent “Ils” (aka “Them” stateside), and out-there concepts, like in last year’s banging “MadS.” It turns out that combining the two—a single setting with a kooky idea—becomes more of an issue for the talented creator as “OTHER,” premiering on Shudder today, is a drastic misstep. It’s through little fault of its fearless leading lady in what is basically a one-woman show, but Moreau can’t quite figure out what story he’s telling here, or the best way to tell it. It’s a messy movie that produces frustration instead of fear, and its nods to commentary on gender roles and the need to become and stay beautiful feel shallow and insincere.
“OTHER” opens with a haunting sequence of a masked figure prowling the grounds of a cold estate where an alarm is clearly going off. Is she the invader or the invaded? We soon learn that she is the now-dead mother of a woman named Alice (Olga Kurylenko), from whom she has been estranged. Alice comes home to discover that her mother has been brutally murdered by “something” and that her house has been essentially fitted like a government base with surveillance systems everywhere. What was Mom scared of? Was it what killed her? And should Alice be scared of it, too?
As Alice tries to figure out exactly what’s going on, she watches VHS recordings of her childhood and has flashbacks to what was clearly an abusive upbringing. There are reminders of the cruelty of Alice’s youth everywhere (even on the soundtrack), and Moreau seems to be aiming for something akin to J-Horror, which often explores how acts of violence can create a supernatural rift in the world, leaving vengeful demons in places where love died. At times, “OTHER” is also almost Lynchian in its depiction of trauma-induced madness as Alice starts to wonder what memories she’s repressed and even what’s real around her. The production design of a home that looks like it never held a peaceful emotion goes a long way, but Moreau can’t figure out how to align his ideas and inspirations into a cohesive vision. Paranoia, grief, trauma, abuse, pain, gender roles, even modern surveillance technology—they’re all thrown into the stew that is this movie without much consideration as to how the ingredients would work together.
It often feels like language is a barrier to Moreau’s vision as well. The films mentioned in the intro are both in French, and it’s inexplicable why he chose to shoot this one in English, as it results in dialogue that often sounds awkwardly translated. Kurylenko does her best to ground Alice and the rest of the film in something relatable, but when everything around her doesn’t sound or feel genuine, then what happens next doesn’t really matter. A relationship between Alice and a doomed boyfriend sounds particularly stilted and disingenuous, adding to the overall amateur sense of the project.
At its core, “OTHER” needed to be a study of madness, a story of a woman forced back to a place that forged her through great pain and what that kind of journey can do to a person’s psyche. There are just too many times when it strays from this focus, wandering into ideas from other films in an effort to be surreal, which only results in disengagement from what works. It’s a film that’s too often annoyingly fleeing from its best ideas, doing something false instead of, well, the other.
On Shudder now.
