STARRING Bond girl Olga Kurylenko, Other starts impressively enough in a haunting sequence with a masked woman wandering the grounds of an inhospitable estate as alarms go off all round her in the dead of night.
Preyed upon by some unknown creature watching her every move, director David Moreau’s latest film reels us in from the off before ultimately tripping over itself after the opening credits have dissipated.
Kurylenko gives a stoic performance throughout as Alice, a long-suffering woman who reluctantly returns to her childhood home after the sudden death of her estranged mother.
On her arrival, Alice finds the house she left as a teenager, frozen in time, complete with ghosts of the past, and dark and sinister secrets that she must now come face to face with. The high-security system that protects this cheerless mansion is no match for the shadowy presence that calls it home, always one step in front of her, as it perseveres to keep Alice a prisoner in this place filled with unhappy memories.
Despite the Quantum of Solace star’s performance, Other is listless and hugely disappointing. The pacing is as slow as molasses, the scares all predictable and rather scarce, and Moreau, if anything, has opted for style over substance. The creature at the heart of this bleak horror lurks in the darkness for the duration, and regardless of its face-chewing aberrations, it does little to get the pulse racing, or the mind working overtime.
In a nutshell, Other is boring. The big reveal in the final scene was obvious from the very beginning and for a man of Moreau’s talents, this is surprisingly all over the place. His last film Mads, was one of the very finest horror films of last year, but sadly, his latest effort is pedestrian and totally forgettable.
(2/5)