To want to be one with the other is at once an impossibly romantic proposition and an utterly frightening one. In his feature film debut “Else,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, director Thibault Emin flirts with the romcom trappings of the former but soon plunges headfirst into the disorienting possibilities of the latter. Anchored by the tale of a budding couple facing an increasingly inescapable threat from the outside world, the film mostly takes place in an apartment that’s equal parts safe haven and prison cell. A tad too heady but quite visually arresting, Emin’s dream-turn-nightmare body horror film is as much a lockdown pandemic fable as it is a philosophical treatise on individuality.
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The aptly named Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) is an anxious mess of a man. His bedroom is decorated with the brazenness of a child (he has red sheets and purple walls, colored lights and equally colorful toys scattered throughout) and he struggles, we soon learn, with creating lasting intimacy with other adults. He’s not one to get to know his building’s neighbors and even falters when needing to quiet down a guy disturbing the peace right outside his window. Which is why he’s quite surprised by how taken he is with Cass (Édith Proust), a whirlwind of a one-night-stand. She’s crass where he’s careful. She’s loud where he’s timid.
Meeting them as we do (naked, he on top of her, struggling and then failing to stay inside her) you’d be forgiven for thinking “Else” was a colorful romp where the comedy of her throwing a half eaten fig on the floor (as he looks on in horror) was front and center. And, for a brief while, “Else” does seem to want to plunge us into a madcap romcom, albeit one housed in Anx’s claustrophobic apartment. Just as quickly, though, Emin suggests there may be something amiss. As a montage of social media-posted pics chronicles their meet-cute at a party the night before, Anx is concerned with one detail in a photo that features neither of them: a man grabbing some popcorn has some odd welts on his other hand.
Anx is right to worry. News soon breaks that there’s an odd skinborn illness running amok. People are melding with everything around them—their phones, the pavement, even rocks. All Anx can do is lock up his apartment and avoid everyone else. Except, of course, for Cass, who’s eager to ride this lockdown with her new fumbling beau. Soon, though, whatever intimacy they cobble together is threatened by the mysterious force that’s absorbing everything in its path. That’s when “Else” becomes a riff on a horror film, with Anx and Cass needing to fend off whatever it is that’s right outside their apartment, a being that may well be telling them, in those most famed “Star Trek” words, that resistance is futile.
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As “Else” jumps from a hazed daydream romance (with home video-like imagery to match) to a bleak lo-fi sci-fi proposition (bleached of all color, its horrors all the more elemental), it is cinematographer Léo Lefèvre who emerges as the film’s MVP. Anx and Cass spend much of the latter part of the film avoiding watchful eyes lest they be infected with whatever is making a giant spongy mass of objects and subjects outside their room. Yet even when such body horror scares end up feeling rather ridiculous, Lefèvre’s camera finds ways of staying enthralling. Some of his ever-confining black-and-white cinematography has an odd kind of beauty that harkens back to Méliès and Wiene.
It helps that Emin’s film has such tactility to it. Anx and Cass fear melding with what’s around them and the film’s very aesthetic keeps us vividly aware of the plasticity of their surroundings. Objects, landscapes, surfaces and even skin are all shot with an alienating, defamiliarizing gaze. This is a tale about what it means to look at the other differently, and that, in turn, teaches us how to do so.
“Else” may try patience as it hopscotches from genre to genre before landing on a bleak meditation. It is both winkingly playful (at one point a rock monster attacks Cass) and surprisingly dour (its final act hinges on a fable about the lungfish and evolution). Such tonal whiplash is intentionally jarring, but not any less irksome. And so, while its lofty ambitions may be tempered by the aesthetic acrobatics that encase them, Emin’s feature is a wonderfully bizarre creation that feels as cobbled together, unruly yet expansive, as its fearsome monster.
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