SHUDDER’S ‘Other’ Does Everything Right… Until It Doesn’t

SHUDDER, the genre imprint of AMC+, has a new film from French auteur David Moreau starring Thunderbolts* star Olga Kurylenko called Other, which premiered Friday, October 17th on its streaming service. The synopsis reads as:

Alice (Olga Kurylenko, Thunderbolts*, Oblivion) returns to her childhood home after her mother’s death, only to find the house is rigged with surveillance tracking her every move, as a sinister presence lurks, driving her towards a terrifying revelation.

What this film does well, it does very well. Opening with a taut and dread-filled two-fold opening, it sets its tone immediately. We first see an amateur sleuth investigating a cold case in the dead of night, wearing a mask to hide his identity. We next see a reclusive mistress awakened from her slumber by the cacophony of her heavily-surveilled home compound. As she ventures further from the security of her home, her face covered by a beauty mask, she is ambushed by a creature, left for dead in the solemn forest.

Now we meet Alice, the heroine of the story, commingled in passion with her lover, Charlie. Post-coital, she questions his safety in their lovemaking, seemingly terrified of becoming pregnant. She is hauled off on a work call and is soon seen at a nearby farm to wrangle a rabid dog. It is never made entirely clear what her career is, but she doesn’t seem to be struggling financially.

We learn that the dead woman from the second sequence is her estranged mother, so Alice is whisked away to her mother’s compound to execute her affairs, much to her chagrin. Their relationship has been strained by years of neglect, but it seems that Alice is unconcerned with any lost time between the generations.

The rest of the film is a masterclass in tension and dread. The camera loves Kurylenko, perhaps a bit too much, but it makes sense for the themes of the film. Tight close-ups of her vulnerable face and extended sequences without pants or shoes add a voyeuristic invasion to Alice’s exposure to the environment, her fears, and our eyes.

Alice’s mother’s home is a shrine to the heroine’s beauty, as it’s revealed that she was a pageant queen in her younger years, groomed to the point of abuse by her vain mother. This is in line with the film’s themes of control, evident in video evidence of their interactions from the past, as well as the oppressive nature of the compound itself. With self-locking doors, an indecipherable security system, and myriad secret passageways, Alice is as much a stranger to the home as she has been to its former master.

This is essentially a creature feature, and we’re led along with the promise of discovering who or what the creature is. Why does it hunt? And why is everyone who seems to be afraid of it hiding their face? The explanation of this mystery is the kryptonite of this otherwise excellent piece of terror.

Other measures out its tension in tiny frames, stretching the suspense to breaking points. It has all the hallmarks of great horror: jump scares, obscured frames of the creature, failing flashlights, and moments in which the viewer can shout “What the fuck are you doing? Don’t do that!” Moreau knows how to craft and sustain tension in a film that gives viewers exactly what they desire from this sort of genre work.

Olga Kurylenko, likewise, is brilliant in her portrayal of Alice, offering a sensitivity and strength in her performance as the narrative plays out around and inside of her. There’s little disingenuousness about her reactions or decisions throughout the film, establishing a credibility that is sadly soured by the film’s conclusion of its themes.

Don’t misunderstand: great horror says more than “boo,” but one gets the impression from this film, once all is said and done, that their time has been wasted, their investment lost. Almost all of the narrative themes are given a payoff, but the return on investment feels lackluster. One high point of praise in the film’s execution is a detail one only notices after the film has wrapped: Alice’s face is the only one we ever see. It’s her film, and everything that happens is in service of her narrative, but once we’re given the full story, we realize we didn’t really want this story.

Incredulity is necessary in horror (these are creatures beyond our imagination, so turn off your credibility sensors), but this case seems to stretch that suspension of disbelief into the territory of gullibility. If you want a tension-filled creature feature, you could do considerably worse than Other. If you want intelligent social commentary that pushes the global conversations around vanity, control, and generational trauma forward, you’re best to look to “other” offerings.

Other is currently streaming on SHUDDER.