October is a big month for horror fans, especially those who subscribe to Shudder, as there are dozens of thrilling titles added to the service’s library, and we also get special events and exclusive titles. Whether it be special broadcasts of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs or an all-new Ghoul Log, there’s no better time to be a Shudder subscriber. Also in October, the service debuts some of its most anticipated and thrilling titles, like V/H/S/Halloween or the TV series Guts & Glory, both of which were released earlier in the month. Another anticipated title is Other, which comes from the director of Ils and MadS. While Other shows glimmers of promise with its ambitious concepts and effective sequences, the overall pacing of the film and the tonally disjointed performances prevent the film from being fully satisfying.

When Alice (Olga Kurylenko) learns that her estranged mother has died, she has to return to her family home to take care of the requisite post-mortem tasks. Alice notices her mother has upgraded her security system and, when she loses her rental car keys, is isolated in the home. Trapped in the home, Alice sorts through her own belongings and is forced to grapple with the emotional and physical abuse she suffered growing up, but her trauma isn’t entirely in the past, as Alice has caught the attention of a sinister figure.

In the opening scene, Alice’s mother emerges from her bedroom wearing a bizarre mask as she wanders out into the woods as she’s being stalked by an unseen…something. The movie immediately grabs your attention, as the mask is reminiscent of something we’ve seen in The Skin I Live In or Goodnight Mommy, so the bar is set high in these opening minutes. While the film is supposedly set in Minnesota, it’s very clear that none of the actors are American, which results in all of them delivering their dialogue in a way that sounds phonetic. Other than Alice, who speaks with an accent and is narratively confirmed to not be from Minnesota, the delivery of the dialogue or the ADR feels stilted and inorganic. Since there’s nothing inherently “American” about the story that unfolded, I wish this could have taken place in France and everyone got to speak French, as this disjunction between the characters in conversation results in a tone that’s hard to nail down.

There’s a lot of symbolism around faces, with Alice’s mother’s body being found with its face seemingly eaten off by animals, though the filmmaker cleverly hides the faces of virtually every character, with the exception of Alice, as a way to reflect the themes of the story. The side effect, though, is only ever really hearing characters while they’re off-screen, which only amplifies the disconnect between all of the characters, to the point that some line deliveries feel like they’re meant to be comedic. Obscuring faces amplifies the movie’s ultimate themes, so I know this was an active decision on the filmmaker’s part, but the unintended consequence is that it only amplifies how Alice feels like she’s never actually interacting with another person.

That said, Kurylenko does manage to keep us invested in what’s happening to Alice — for the most part. Other isn’t the first movie to deliver a character who is entertaining themselves all alone in a big, spooky house, and there are moments in which Alice’s exploration keeps us invested, only for her to stumble across the occasional bizarre reveal. This formula of Alice’s solo explorations and teases of nefarious elements wears out its welcome, though, as it feels like this eats up the better part of an hour. (I wasn’t specifically checking my watch, so maybe it was literally 25 minutes, but these sequences were so taxing that it felt like an hour.)

Once the inciting incidents start to unfold, there are definitely some effectively bizarre sequences of the dangers lurking around Alice, and the justification and explanation of this bizarreness also feel unsettling. However, after spending so much time grounded in the reality of Alice exploring her mother’s house, when these heightened events start to happen, they feel so strange compared to everything that preceded it that it almost feels cartoonishly weird as opposed to organically unnerving.

This isn’t to say that elements of the movie don’t work or that there aren’t fascinating elements to be found within Other. The violence in the movie feels like a throwback to the New French Extremity movement, due to how visceral these more intense sequences are, and as someone who is petrified by the idea of phrogging (someone living in your house without you knowing it), there’s glimmers of disturbing ideas. Sadly, with how long we spent solely on Alice’s explorations, combined with the overall disconnect between her and any character she interacts with and jarring tonal shifts, Other has a lot of the ingredients that make for a dark and disturbing movie but is a recipe that just doesn’t quite work.

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