Other (2025)
Spooktober Challenge 2025
Premise: Alice’s estranged mom has died in a kinda freaky way (her whole face was cut off? And I mean, bones and all? Yeah that must have been an accident!) and she needs to go to her childhood home while they do all the paperwork and stuff I guess. The house: cool, but you know exactly in the middle of where it is, also completely full of security devices and stuff, also a shitty teen neighbour who is into true crime too much and yeah there’s a chance there’s something living in or around the house too?
Under 90 minutes? nah, five minutes over the mark
Do they say the title? Yeah, yeah they do!
One sentence review: there is a hilarious scene involving a shock dog collar and the main character showing that she, like Bart Simpson, is dumber than a hamster and I live for that kind of crap.
Okay, more: Look, it wasn’t the best movie I’ve watched this year by any means, it’s definitely worse than the other two films directed by David Moreau that I’ve watched (Ils and last year’s MadS - which, funny, I watched a year and a day ago)… but it is a very fun horror thriller with some comedy thrown here and there if you’re the kind of person that laughs at uncomfortably horrible stuff. The second horror movie I watch in like two weeks where you can’t see anybody’s faces other than the main character basically, which gets unsettling very quickly (for those keeping track of this kind of thing). There are way, way worse ways to spend an afternoon. Like being the main character of a horror movie, for example.
A simple way to improve it: Early in the movie there are at least a couple of absolute “clues” about where the plot was going to go to that made me groan. Like, the foreshadowing equivalent to a person folding a piece of paper and then putting a pen through it to explain wormholes?
THEN you find out those were red herrings and it is very very obvious that the writer knew what they were doing there. Very fun stuff and I want more misdirection like that because it absolutely played with “oh so you know the genre, right.”
Trivia about the IMDb trivia user reviews:
Presented without comment, one of the best and most sincere reviews I’ve ever read whre you can feel the frustration (i didn’t have this problem):
⭐ 1 / 10
I’m done with movies you can’t watch in a room with light.
Couldn’t tell you much about the movie since many scenes important to the plot are impossible to see because they were filmed in such dim lighting that you can’t tell what the F is going on unless your watching in a pitch dark room. Movie need to post in their ratings and warning “Not suitable for daytime viewing.”
I’m sure the director thinks this kind of cinematography will build suspense, but for me it only delivers endless frustration. I’m done with these dimly lit horror movies. From now on the minute I see nothing but a black screen with a few metallic glints for more than 30 seconds I’m hitting the channel button.
