A woman finds a nightmarish scenario awaiting her when she returns to her childhood home following her mother's death.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Moreau
Starring: Olga Kurylenko, Jean Schatz, Lola Bonaventure, Jacqueline Ghaye
When The Strangers was released in 2008, many compared it to a French movie from a couple of years earlier - David Moreau and Xavier Palud's Ils (aka 'Them'). Both movies had the same premise of a couple terrorised in a remote home by ambiguous antagonists who seem to have chosen them as random targets. The Strangers has recently been rebooted as a thus far terrible trilogy by Renny Harlin, and Moreau has now returned to a similar setup of a protagonist stuck in an isolated location with a malevolent villain for his latest horror, Other.
Olga Kurylenko's face is the only one we see on screen throughout Other. There are supporting characters and a few extras, but we don't see their faces, as Moreau finds various ways of ensuring they remain obscured, including simply blurring them out at times. Other is obsessed with faces, as is its antagonist, someone or something that likes to removes the faces of its victims. There's a sub-plot involving the protagonist's miserable teenage years, when her mother forced her to enter beauty contests, so Moreau is clearly interested in the value of a face, and there are few more interesting than that of Kurylenko.
The Ukrainian model-turned-actress plays Alice, a veterinarian who is almost savaged by a deranged dog before receiving a phone call informing her that her estranged mother has passed away. Unlike Alice, the audience has been made privy to the gruesome circumstances of her mother's death in a prologue that saw her attacked by someone or something in the woods surrounding her remote home.
Alice reluctantly returns to her childhood home, hoping to get whatever paperwork is necessary out of the way as quickly as possible. Fate, or perhaps something else, conspires to make her stick around when she loses her car keys and has to wait a couple of days for a new set to arrive via courier. Alice settles in, gets drunk on wine, rediscovers her teenage CD collection and dances around in her undies to pass the time, unaware that she's not alone in the house. Someone/something keeps scurrying past the camera like a four-legged Chucky doll. When Alice comes across her mother's collection of VHS tapes, she finds them filled with footage that brings back traumatic memories of Alice's time as a beauty queen.
Surveillance is another theme on Moreau's mind. Alice's mother's home is equipped with an elaborate security system with motion sensors and numerous cameras covering every corner of the house and its grounds. There's also a drone that seems to be spying on Alice from above.
Moreau seems to have a lot on his mind here - faces, beauty, surveillance - but the various themes fail to coalesce into a satisfying narrative. It's well shot and if you're only going to have one face on screen, there are certainly worse choices than Kurylenko's. But Other eventually becomes repetitive as it spends most of its first hour repeating the same shtick of the oblivious Alice failing to notice the strange figure scuttling around her temporary abode. There are lots of questions raised, and when the film eventually provides answers they're laughably ridiculous.
Kurylenko isn't a strong enough performer to carry what is mostly a solo show, and her performance is pitched a notch too high here. This French production features some terrible American accents from its seemingly dubbed supporting cast. The overall effect is of a late period Italian horror movie made by a once great auteur who long ago ran out of ideas. But those Italian horror movies had a dream logic that often allowed you to dismiss their plot failings. Moreau on the other hand wants the audience to get wrapped up in his plot, as though he's oblivious to how ludicrous it really is.
Other is on Shudder from October 17th.
