OTHER – Review

Ready for another spooky Halloween warm-up? In OTHER, Olga Kurylenko stars as Alice – a veterinarian with a boyfriend, Charlie (Philip Schurer), and an abiding loathing for her estranged mother. When she hears that mom died rather gruesomely, she’s far from upset, but flies to her home to do her daughterly duty. Mom’s huge home is far from any neighbors and heavily insulated against the outside world by an elaborate security system worthy of a CIA “dark site.” A paranoid’s idea of Heaven.

We gradually learn why Alice hated her mom through flashbacks and saved videotapes showing that the old gal had been the uberbitch of stage moms, forcing her kid into performing and parading in beauty pageants with Draconian diet and training demands. Alice is a beauty, so she probably had some success despite her wishes to do something else – anything else – during her formative years.

While on the isolated, gated estate, Alice is besieged with strange sounds and movements just teasing the margins of her range of vision. She senses something trying to harm, if not kill, her, though remaining clueless as to what and why. Throughout her ordeal, there’s virtually no other human activity on screen. Charlie is mostly involved by phone. A neighbor kid with a drone pops up a few times, both scared by and drawn to whatever evil forces there be, offering little help to our heroine.

The good news is that for its 95 minutes, the camera is almost always on its exotically attractive star. And at the risk of being labeled sexist, the fact that she’s bare-legged and in tight t-shirts for most of it makes up for a chunk of the film’s considerable shortcomings. Kurylenko is probably best known as one of James Bond’s paramours in 2008’s QUANTUM OF SOLACE. She does not appear to have aged in the intervening 17 years. Most of us wish we could say the same.

There are a generous number of jump scares: some gory bits; and the extremes of security features and other happenings that keep her housebound are intriguing. The fact that I never figured out the WHY of it all was frustrating. I really can’t swear to how much of that was the script’s defects or intention vs. my own failing. You’d have to ask director and co-author David Moreau; I’m not sure that Kurylenko was even privy to the explanation. Perhaps your brain will catch what I missed, or appreciate the unanswered questions more than I could.

OTHER debuts streaming on Shudder on Friday, Oct. 17, 2025.

RATING: 1.5 out of 4 stars