By Hope Madden 
Other
Alice returns home after her mother’s death to find the house unchanged-and haunted by a dark presence. As fear builds, buried trauma resurfaces, and a terrifying truth is revealed.
Release date: 9 July 2025 (France)
Director: David Moreau
Running time: 1h 35m
Language: French
David Moreau has built a reputation as a director unafraid to wield the formal tools of cinema in the pursuit of dread. With films like the nerve-shredding Them and last year’s ingeniously constructed MadS, which employed a single, unbroken shot to masterful effect, Moreau has consistently proven his talent for using narrative experimentation to amplify horror.
His latest feature, Other, represents another bold step into this territory of formal play. The film introduces us to Alice, a veterinarian played by Olga Kurylenko, who is summoned back to her isolated childhood home in the Minnesota woods to settle the affairs of her estranged, recently deceased mother. The setting itself is a character, a house besieged by surveillance cameras and barbed wire, suggesting a fortress against an unseen threat.
True to his style, Moreau uses this setup not just for scares, but for conceptual ambition. In Other, he makes the striking choice to obscure every face but Kurylenko’s, hiding other characters behind screens, masks, and odd camera angles. It is a clear thematic gambit, pointing toward ideas of a surveillance state, the objectification of women, and fractured identity.
Other (2024) Review: David Moreau’s Well Intentioned Experimental Misfire
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
David Moreau makes enough really fascinating horror movies that there’s always reason for optimism when a new one releases. The filmmaker often plays with the language of film to refocus attention and generate dread. Last year’s MadS used point of view filmmaking and the concept of a single, unbroken shot to remarkably tense results.
Other, Moreau’s latest feature, is another opportunity for narrative experimentation. Olga Kurylenko plays Alice, a veterinarian called back to Minnesota to deal with her estranged mother’s remains. Alice hasn’t been home in many, many years and the house, isolated in the middle of the woods and surrounded by surveillance cameras and barb wire fencing, is no more inviting than it was when she left.
Kurylenko has a lovely face, which is good because it’s the only one we see clearly in the entire film. There are other characters, but their faces are obscured, either by broken screens or odd point of view, or masks, which many of the characters wear. Moreau is making points about a surveillance state, the objectification of women, and identity with this move. It’s an interesting idea, or set of ideas, but he never manages to pull them together into a cohesive or rewarding theme.
Because you see no faces clearly, Moreau isn’t obligated to use dialogue from any of the actors, aside from Kurylenko. And he doesn’t. The result is the kind of dreamily absurd voiceover work Lucio Fulci was known for: adult women doing voicework of young boys and European actors badly attempting American accents. In the context of the delightfully nonsensical logic of a Fulci film, this can be acceptable, even entertaining. But Moreau is taking his film and its mystery seriously, so the painfully unrealistic Minnesota accents feel comical.
Not that American actors would have had much better luck with this script. There’s too little for Kurylenko to work with for two thirds of the film, leaving her to her own devices to compel interest, and she’s just not strong enough an actor to pull that off. When the film falls off its rails in Act 3, Kurylenko’s shortcomings and the silly voiceovers just seem par for the course.
Not every experiment works, and Moreau deserves credit for once again stretching. But I’d recommend watching or rewatching his 2006 masterwork Them instead of Other.
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Brooklyn Ewing