The Watcher Becomes the Witness

Read Time:5 Minute, 30 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Other
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Genre: Horror, Thriller, Mystery
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 35m
Director(s): David Moreau
Writer(s): Jon Goldman, David Moreau
Cast: Olga Kurylenko, Jean Schatz, Lola Bonaventure, Anne-Pascale Clairembourg, Philip Schurer, Ange Nawasadio
Where to Watch: streaming on Shudder, October 17, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: OTHER begins with unease: this isn’t just a haunted house story—it’s a story about the rules that outlive the person who made them. After her mother’s death, Alice returns to a home that still feels organized by someone else’s hand. Its order is oppressive, its quiet too deliberate, its memories arranged like evidence. What follows isn’t about ghosts or monsters; it’s about inheritance—the kind that teaches you what to fear, how to behave, and when to stay silent.

Olga Kurylenko anchors the story with a performance built on tension rather than terror. Alice isn’t a victim and she isn’t a hero—she’s a survivor of repetition. There’s a precision to how she moves through the house, as though she’s been rehearsing obedience her entire life. Fear, here, isn’t about what’s hiding in the dark; it’s about the rules that never stopped applying. When Alice begins to test those rules—where she sleeps, what she touches, which spaces she claims—the dread morphs into something personal. OTHER understands that sometimes horror is just the slow rediscovery of autonomy.

Director David Moreau builds that theme through structure rather than exposition. The house seems to be “off”; something isn’t right here. Hallways look the same but feel different. Actions echo back with new meanings. A phrase that once sounded benign returns like an accusation. It’s not a movie about jump scares; it’s a movie about patterns, about how control hides in routine until you start noticing the seams. That repetition becomes its measure—each loop revealing more about who’s been pulling the strings.

Kurylenko thrives in that environment. She gives Alice a fractured self-awareness shaped by years of being observed. You can see calculation flicker across her face as she tests each boundary—first to survive, then to rebel, then to define herself outside the frame. The performance invites empathy through sheer exhaustion. She’s angry, impatient, sometimes reckless—and that’s exactly what makes her human. OTHER’s best moments are wordless, when her silence feels like refusal rather than fear.

Cards, photographs, and furniture are framed as evidence, curated into a version of memory that’s easier to control. It’s a clever metaphor for generational conditioning—love posing as protection, affection doubling as control. The story suggests that the scariest inheritance isn’t trauma itself, but the system built to keep it hidden.

Moreau stages the film with precision and patience. The visuals are sterile but tactile—white light, quiet hallways, the hum of something just off-screen. He favors stillness over spectacle, trusting discomfort to do the work of fear. A corridor becomes accusatory under a new context; a nightly ritual mutates into something menacing once its purpose changes. When the camera lingers, it isn’t waiting for a jump scare—it’s letting you realize how long Alice has lived inside someone else’s world.

The supporting characters orbit Alice like ghosts of compliance—more functions than people, and that’s kind of the point. The story treats them as extensions of the same system that built her: tools of reinforcement, not empathy. Yet traces of something deeper surface in their brief appearances—moments where beauty, performance, and visibility blur together. Those moments beg for another minute or two of breath, but the film moves past them, more interested in enigma than psychology.

The film’s design mirrors its themes, quite literally; mirrors act as checkpoints; compliments sound like commands; even silence feels supervised. OTHER keeps returning to the idea that presentation is a cage disguised as affection—that looking perfect is its own form of obedience. When it finally reveals why some faces are blurred and others framed, the meaning lands with precision. It’s not about ghosts. It’s about ownership—who gets to be visible, and who disappears when they stop complying.

If OTHER struggles anywhere, it’s in its restraint. The ending ties everything together too neatly—rules exposed, power reclaimed—but it hesitates to explore what comes after. The bigger question lingers, unspoken—if your entire identity has been shaped by being seen, what remains when the gaze disappears?

OTHER stands as a quietly unnerving entry in psychological horror’s “new wave.” It’s less about haunted houses than haunted expectations, and it refuses to patronize its audience with cheap catharsis. The story’s pulse is small but steady, built on the fear that behaving can be more dangerous than rebelling. It’s about reclaiming the right to misbehave—to exist beyond perfection, unobserved and unapproved. OTHER leaves you with one final, lingering thought: being watched isn’t the same as being known—and the moment you stop performing is the moment the real horror begins.

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[photo courtesy of SHUDDER]

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