OTHER - Mark Reviews Movies

Other, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 16, 2025

No face but the protagonist's can be seen clearly or at all in Other, which might be the most striking thing about co-writer/director David Moreau's movie. It suggests much about how Alice (Olga Kurylenko) or, maybe, someone else in this story sees the world. Just from that uncertainty about what the point of the gimmick actually is, it is also so befuddling as to be the only interesting element in a horror tale that goes from routine to ridiculous by the end.

The routine of it is that Alice, who's married to Charlie (Philip Schurer) and worries that she might be pregnant from their most recent encounter, finds herself alone in her childhood home. Is she really alone, though? To get the appropriate tone of dismissal, it's best to read that preceding sentence in as clichéd a goofily sinister voice as one can muster.

Of course, Alice isn't alone, because her mother (played by Jacqueline Ghaye) is killed by something that has been stalking the woods surrounding this fortress of a mansion the mother has made for herself. We get that in one of those requisite sequences of every horror movie, as the mother is alerted to someone—or something—intruding on her property by an elaborate security system, heads outside in her sleeping clothes and a beauty mask to check out what's happening, and falls down a hill, leaving that mask behind.

The sudden lack of a moisturizing treatment would seem a trivial point, except that whoever—or whatever—is in the forest has been killing animals and the occasional person. For whatever reason, the killer also destroys or, possibly, eats the victim's face.

Alice knows none of this, of course, when she returns to her old home to wait for the coroner to release her mother's body so she can be done with this unfortunate business. She and her mother haven't been on good or even speaking terms for decades, but even so, it would seem important information to tell the woman that her mother was potentially murdered and that her body was mutilated in brutal fashion near the house Alice is about to be staying in for an uncertain amount of time. The local cops don't seem too concerned with this pattern of mysterious deaths, even though a local boy (played by Sasha Nugent) in a mask has been gathering news clippings about all of those deaths, collecting evidence, and flying a drone around to get photos of the likely crime scenes.

Anyway, Alice spends her time drinking, getting high on marijuana from her teen years, wandering the house, and reliving the torment of being her mother's daughter. As a teenager, Alice was a beauty show competitor, even making it to a national competition representing her home state of Minnesota. Her mother was quite the controlling, judgmental type, too, and shelves of old video tapes showing a young Alice (played by Lola Bonaventure) practicing her introduction as the mother scolds her for putting on even the slightest amount weight serve as proof of that.

Ultimately, none of this has much to do with anything in the story, since it comes down to scenes of things going bump and scurrying about in the night, or for Alice as a character, since the only thing that matters about her in relation to what's happening in the house isn't revealed until the third act of Moreau and Jon Goldman's screenplay. It's quite convenient, in fact, that Alice chooses the videos she does to watch in order to relive her traumatic teenage years, because one of those tapes, without saying too much, just happens to have the answer to everything Alice doesn't even know to be a question in the first place.

Otherwise, the movie is mostly a string of scenes of the main character going through the house and finding hints that something is terribly amiss, including a dog collar—with no dog attached to it—that opens up some of the doors, and other scenes in which a crawling, human-like thing—or actual person—wanders through the house, too. At times, the beast (played by Jean Schatz), as the credits refer to the figure, gets very close to Alice while she sleeps or rushes out from a shadow, but all things considered, it doesn't seem to affect Alice that much, because she just keeps going about her business.

There's no real sense of threat here, since Alice's memories of the past seem completely removed from the figure stalking her. The two stories are more intertwined than they seem, however, but when Other explains how, it's too ludicrous for even the movie itself to stick around to try to explain it.

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