David Moreau made one of the most genuinely unsettling home invasion films of the 2000s with Ils (Them), a French thriller that understood how terror works best in confined spaces. More recently, his single-take zombie experiment MadS proved he’s willing to take creative risks even when they don’t entirely pay off. So when I heard he was making Other, a horror film about a woman returning to her childhood home to confront something monstrous, I was intrigued. Unfortunately, this one’s a mess—and not the interesting kind that’s fun to poke through.

Alice (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace) has returned to her estranged mother’s house after the woman dies under mysterious circumstances. The opening scene sets an eerie tone. A woman we’ll come to know as her mother, wearing one of those creepy plastic beauty masks, is woken up due to a disturbance in her house. Something is loose, and she knows what it is.  As she peers nervously into the darkness while searching the grounds, something terrible happens.

When Alice arrives to settle the estate, she finds the place frozen in time, complete with late ’90s nostalgia and, more disturbingly, an elaborate surveillance system watching every room. Who installed all these cameras? What was her mother so afraid of? Why is Alice driving a car with license plates that switch from the highway to the secluded country road the house is tucked away on?

The answers (to everything but the license plates) are linked to a creature that tears away faces, a masked video blogger investigating the disappearance of a local boy years earlier, and a warning from the masked investigator: “Don’t show your face. It likes faces.” That’s actually a pretty solid sell for a horror film. The idea that everyone needs to hide their identity to survive, that showing your face makes you prey—there’s real potential there.

So why does Moreau blur out nearly every face in the entire movie except Kurylenko’s? I get the thematic connection—if the monster targets faces, obscuring them makes narrative sense. But the execution is bizarre. It looks like those police shows where they digitally blur witnesses, pulling you out of the story constantly. Worse, all the dialogue has been replaced with ADR using different voice actors, and the sync is terrible. You’re watching actors speak with voices that clearly don’t match their physical performances. It’s like watching a dubbed foreign film where nobody bothered to watch the film while they were doing their job.

And then there’s the Minneapolis thing. Look, I live here, so maybe I’m more sensitive to this than most viewers, but why on earth is this film set in Minnesota? Kurylenko has a thick European accent. Every supporting character sounds vaguely European. The whole aesthetic screams Eastern European indie horror. Nothing about the story requires Minneapolis—literally any location would work. It feels like someone threw a dart at a map and committed to it without thinking through the implications. It’s distracting in ways that keep compounding as the film goes on.

What saves Other from complete disaster is Kurylenko herself. She’s alone in nearly every frame, and she commits fully to Alice’s psychological unraveling. The film hints at a controlling mother who forced her into beauty pageants, surveillance that monitored her every move as a child, and even deeper traumas she’s tried desperately to forget. Kurylenko plays it all internally—there’s this quiet terror swimming beneath everything she does. She’s a genuinely talented actress doing her absolute best with material that isn’t giving her much support.

When the film works though, it really works. The surveillance system creates authentic dread. The creature attacks are genuinely disturbing—Moreau knows how to stage violence that unsettles rather than just grosses you out, aided by cinematographer Julien Ramirez Hernan. The masked blogger subplot adds interesting layers about internet investigation culture and local urban legends. There are individual sequences that remind you Moreau has serious talent for sustained tension. The production design from Julien Dubourg is excellent, trapping Alice in her childhood bedroom like a museum exhibit of her own trauma. Louis Bart’s sound design fills empty spaces with menace as Alice tries to move around the house unnoticed by an entity that can see better than she.

But these moments can’t overcome how frustratingly the plot unfolds. Things meander when they should accelerate. Alice makes choices that defy logic—at one point her clothes are shredded by the creature the same time her keys vanish, and instead of leaving immediately, she just wanders around in her underwear taking painful trips down memory lane. The film withholds information it should establish earlier, making the ending feel unearned even though the title’s double meaning (spoiler: “Other” is short for “Mother”) is admittedly clever. Still, we needed one more scene earlier on in the vening to make everything click at the end.

Here’s what exhausted me most: the pieces are there for something genuinely unsettling. We’re in this incredible moment for female led horror films—The Substance just did brilliant work with body horror and beauty standards, Nightbitch explored maternal rage with real emotional honesty. Other gestures at similar themes—maternal control, immigrant family secrets, the monstrous things we inherit—but never develops any of them fully. It’s all surface-level suggestion without the follow-through.  And with a few small tweaks, it could have gotten there.

The 95-minute runtime helps—at least Moreau doesn’t drag this out unnecessarily. And I can imagine viewers who accept the visual choices from the start might find more to appreciate than I did, especially in Kurylenko’s performance and the atmospheric sequences that do land. But Other feels like a first draft that needed serious development before production started. Moreau has made genuinely effective horror films before. This isn’t one of them, and the worst part is you can see what it might have been if someone had pumped the brakes and asked harder questions during development.