PLOT: Alice returns to her childhood residence after her mom’s loss of life, solely to seek out the home is rigged with surveillance monitoring her each transfer, as a sinister presence lurks, driving her in the direction of a terrifying revelation.
REVIEW: If there’s one factor that’s nice for a horror film, it’s isolation. Placing a personality by themselves with little hope for assist once they want it’s one thing that’s immediately relatable. There’s a palpable rigidity and is a common feeling, that instantly asks the query: “What would you do in this situation?” Add in a scary monster that mangles faces, and also you’ve bought Different, a movie that isn’t assured sufficient in its preliminary idea to see by to the top.
Olga Kurylenko’s Alice is a former mannequin who clearly had a really traumatic childhood. Returning to her childhood residence brings up a slew of distressing reminiscences for her. The loss of life of her mom means extra than simply coping with her property, it’s about coping with the trauma that she inflicted on her daughter. These are among the movie’s extra attention-grabbing moments, because it offers with extra psychological horror. One of many extra intriguing elements of the movie is how a lot Alice doesn’t desire a child. What first looks as if perhaps only a girl who’s striving for independence rapidly turns into a lady who clearly doesn’t need to mess up a baby, like her mom did to her.
However there’s additionally a monster lurking within the woods and the home that’s the extra manifested terror of the movie. It’s an attention-grabbing idea that the monster assaults individuals’s faces, particularly given the entire mannequin and sweetness ingredient. And the gore FX are dealt with fairly properly and will be slightly disturbing. I actually simply want that they’d prevented the bodily being and simply caught with a extra psychological intestine punch. As soon as issues grow to be extra creature characteristic, it loses most of what it had going for it. And there’s a random aspect character who doesn’t actually make quite a lot of sense apart from for a little bit of exposition, which makes the narrative really feel a bit lazy.
David Moreau has at all times been a reasonably attention-grabbing director, with final 12 months’s zombie movie MadS having the distinctive gimmick of being carried out in “one take.” Different takes a much less excessive method, however nonetheless an attention-grabbing one, with Kurylenko being the principle face we’re seeing all through the movie. We see most of the different characters by masks or summary imagery. It’s all carried out with a function, and is truthfully not even one thing I seen until near the top. There’s a payoff for all of this, however I’m truthfully undecided if it was even one thing that many viewers will even discover, the monster ingredient overshadows among the extra refined themes.
I actually loved the place Different finally ends up, as foolish as it could be, however the idea appears stretched fairly skinny. I may see this working a lot better as a brief movie, as the fabric doesn’t appear to warrant a full-length characteristic. It’s properly shot, and I loved the secluded forest setting, however its pacing leaves loads to be desired. Held up by Kurylenko’s efficiency, there’s not a lot else to know onto. Particularly for the reason that horror itself feels fairly sterile outdoors of some fast jumpscares and “gotcha” moments. This does present that Kurylenko is able to extra than simply motion roles, and hopefully, she continues to get alternatives throughout the style.
Different is Streaming On Shudder on October seventeenth, 2025.
