O.T.H.E.R
Alice Tarkovsky’s life is at a crossroads, disengaged from her relationship with her boyfriend Charlie who thinks he is far funnier and essential in her life than he actually is and receiving a call that her estranged mother who lived alone beyond Twin Falls, Minnesota, has been found dead, her body having lain undiscovered for a week.
Post-mortem predation having destroyed her face, she is not the only death in the Nerstrand Forest, sixteen-year old Tommy McGregor having been found in similar circumstances four years previously, and Alice travels to the house to deal with the aftermath but is plagued by strange noises, by objects moving in the house, the security system constantly triggering for no apparent reason, coming to believe some animal prowls the darkness.
Directed by David Moreau from a script co-written with Jon Goldman and filmed in the forests of Lasne and Nivelles south of Brussels in Belgium, O.T.H.E.R sees Oblivion’s Olga Kurylenko returning to deal with the death and estate of her mother, the only character whose face is seen clearly, all others masked, in shadow, out of focus, behind curtains or fractured on a damaged monitor, an artistic decision which makes dubbing the European actors with American accents easier but remains irksomely apparent throughout.
Yet despite being the constant focus of the film and the frame, Alice herself remains similarly indistinct, uncommunicative and distant and prone to locking herself out of the house, dropping keys and forgetting to charge her phone, clumsy beyond the additional unexplained activity in the house which hides the car keys and sets her mother’s archive of videotapes in precarious towers and expecting Charlie to share the burden of her birth control when he is clearly irresponsible.
Paralleling much of Moreau’s one-note 2006 thriller Ils (Them) where a French couple are terrorised through the night by the noises made by their unseen assailants, after the promising opening act O.T.H.E.R falls into a tiresome pattern of diminishing returns, alarms and alerts, flashing lights and knocks and bangs and creaks, the increasingly fearful and tearful Alice grating in her inability to properly investigate or prepare herself to resist.
The only other significant presence in the film masked teenage bicycle riding drone operator Tyrell (Ange Nawasadio) who would prefer to offer cryptic advice from a distance and is more interested in clicks and likes on her channel than actually helping, while at times well-executed O.T.H.E.R suffers from a bare-bones premise, the isolation making the film entirely dependent on Alice and so her deficiencies becoming the failings of the film.
O.T.H.E.R will be available on Shudder from Friday 17th October
