A mysterious virus that causes its victims bodies to fuse with inanimate objects runs amok in an apartment block.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Thibault Emin
Starring: Matthieu Sampeur, Edith Proust, Lika Minamoto
French genre filmmakers have reacted to the COVID pandemic with a distinctive strain of body-horror. In Julia Ducournau's Alpha, a virus causes its victims to turn into a marble-like substance. Thomas Cailley's The Animal Kingdom features a pandemic that transforms people into human-animal hybrids. Now director Thibault Emin adds to this curious new wave of Gallic body horror with Else, in which a mysterious plague causes humans (and animals) to fuse with and blend into their inorganic surrounds.
The movie is centred on two characters and never leaves its location of an apartment. We open with the aftermath of what appears to have been a disastrous one night stand. The aptly named Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) has suffered performance anxiety and is mocked by Cass (Edith Proust), who nicknames him "Tiny Softie." In that moment, Anx wants the world to swallow him, and in a cruelly ironic twist of fate, that's just what happens when the aforementioned pandemic strikes.
Despite his embarrassment, Anx can't stop thinking about Cass, and he's surprised when she shows up at his apartment just before the city is placed under a strict lockdown. Two people who are essentially polar opposites now find themselves trapped together. Anx is an introverted hypochondriac while Cass is outgoing and chaotic. But as they say, opposites attract, and Anx and Cass hit it off, with Cass even receiving the sort of orgasms she hasn't experienced in years.
Emin spends much time allowing us to get to know and like his two leads, which adds weight when the inevitable tragedy of the "virus" strikes. Anx and Cass believe they are protected from the outside world until they realise that such a concept is quickly becoming redundant. Inside and outside are folding in on each other as the entire world begins to meld into a single mass. Our protagonists find themselves trapped in an apartment block that has become a living, breathing entity. It seems at some point they too will be consumed and cease to exist as individuals.
Else is less directly a COVID allegory and more concerned with universal themes like evolution, the need to open your heart to others, and making the most of your limited time on Earth. The hypochondriac Anx is so concerned with futile attempts to avoid becoming a victim that he spends his final days in a constant state of anxiety. Cass, on the other hand, accepts her fate and wants to enjoy the time she has left with Anx. The setup is reminiscent of David Mackenzie's under-rated 2011 film Perfect Sense, in which two people fall in love as an unexplained pandemic robs everyone of their senses. That film did a much better job, however, of outlining the rules of its world. Else struggles to communicate its ideas, leaving us to ask inconvenient questions about why this pandemic appears to work in contradictory ways. Explanations are provided in a clunky and inorganic manner whenever the script backs itself into a corner.
At its core, Else is a simple story of two people finding their soulmates just as the world is ending. It becomes less interesting late on when it attempts to tackle the more esoteric idea of evolution, aping (no pun intended) 2001: A Space Odyssey in its final psychedelic moments. But where this film really stands out is as a showcase for its marvellous production design. The evolution of Anx's apartment block into a lifeform complete with a digestive tract in the form of its garbage chute is rendered in striking fashion. Sequences involving humans and animals fusing with their environment owe much to the cult Japanese cyberpunk classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and when Emin switches to monochrome for one such set-piece his acknowledgement of such an influence is clear.
Else probably has more on its mind than its Japanese predecessor, even if it doesn't always communicate its concepts in the clearest fashion. Its most compelling idea comes when Anx and Cass learn that receptiveness to the virus is transmitted by staring into another person's eyes. This leaves us with the question of whether it's worth living a prolonged life that denies you from looking into the eyes of the person you love? Maybe it is about COVID after all.
Else is on UK/ROI VOD from March 2nd.
