OTHER (2025)

New streaming on Shudder!
Directed by David Moreau.
Written by Jon Goldman, David Moreau.
Check out the trailer here!!

When her reclusive mother dies, Alice (Olga Kurylenko) reluctantly returns to her childhood home to sign some papers and finds herself trapped in the home for the weekend. Unbeknownst to Alice, there is some kind of creature lurking in the surrounding forest that has an appetite for faces.

David Moreau was behind last year’s MADS which was a one-take infection movie, the Jessica Alba flick THE EYE, and of course, the phenomenal ILS aka THEM. So, when a new movie is released by the guy, I pay attention. With OTHER, he delivers another highly stylistic and moody film that meanders a bit in the middle but ends up working marvelously in the end.

OTHER would fall on its face without the brilliant performance from its lead, Olga Kurlyenko. The actress has gotten a long way on her supermodel looks, but here she really embodies a damaged soul, surviving what seems to be horrifying abuse from her mother as seen through video tapes Alice finds in the home. Through these tapes, it seems as if Alice’s mom was a typical beauty pageant mom, forcing her young daughter through strict oversight, cruel verbal abuse, and rigorous physical torture to look the part of a model. Seeing Kurylenko’s face deflate while rewatching and reexperiencing this abuse is heartbreaking. For the entire film, the focus is on Kurylenko’s Alice, and while there is a bit of an overlong section of self-pity on Alice’s part, the film picks back up with the climactic battle with the monster. Still, she carries this film firmly on her shoulders every arduous step of the way.

And when I say the entire focus of the film is on Alice, I mean it. Right up until the very end, no other faces are seen in OTHER. Every other tertiary character; Alice’s boyfriend, the maintenance guy, the rescue workers, the police investigators. All of them have their faces obscured in one way or another in OTHER. Of course, there is a point of this. Alice’s true self was scrubbed away and tied up in a little bow as a child by her mother. The entire point of the film is about identity and how our parents can take that from us. So, by obscuring the focus of the rest of the cast, including the monster stalking her in the background, the focus is squarely on Alice, who herself is attempting to understand her own identity at what seems to be the lowest part of her life.

This lack of faces isn’t made completely clear until a bit into the movie when you realize everyone talking with Alice is through a broken or obscured screen or masked in some way or simply cut out of frame like the parents in the Peanuts cartoon. The fact that the adults are not seen in Peanuts or this film suggests some type of connection, possibly saying that this is a story about children (even though Alice is an adult, she does live a stunted life). These children are trying to find out who they are and where their place is in the world. Moreau didn’t go so far as to have the other actors sound like a muted trombone, but he comes damn near close a few times.

This could have been a simple style choice to appear smart by the director, but as the story goes on, the mystery deepens, as does Alice’s connection with the monster roaming the grounds and eating away its victims’ faces (yet another means to not show faces in this film). These scenes are terrifying and the late-in-the-game revelations really home in on how extreme the abuse Alice survived really was. No spoilers here, but the revelations in the last fifteen minutes prove to be highly intense and not for the squeamish.

The acting of Kurylenko and the stylistic choices by Moreau really does elevate OTHER from a typical monster on the loose flick to something quite personally devastating. It reminded me somewhat of the overlooked indie gem from a few years ago CUCKOO that proved to be a bit too artsy and surreal for mainstream audiences. OTHER will hit in the same way as it deals with some very uncomfortable themes of abuse and motherhood. Still, I was blown away by the lead performance as well as the mystery once completely unfolded. This is a powerful one that proves Moreau is a filmmaker that deserves a bigger audience.