The desire to be one with another is both an impossible and downright terrifying romantic proposition. In his feature debut, “Else,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, director Thibault Amin flirts with the romantic-comedy trappings of the former, but quickly becomes immersed in the disorienting possibilities of the latter. Based on the story of a budding couple facing an inescapable threat from the outside world, the film is mostly set in an apartment that is equal parts safe haven and prison cell. Amin’s dream-turned-nightmare body-horror film is a deeply terrifying yet riveting film that is as much a fable about the lockdown pandemic as it is a philosophical treatise on individuality.
The aptly named Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) is a man who is an anxious mess. His bedroom is decorated with the cheekiness of a child (he has red sheets and purple walls, colorful lights and equally colorful toys scattered throughout) and he struggles, as we soon learn, to create lasting intimacy with other adults. He’s not one to get to know his building’s neighbors, and even stumbles when he needs to calm down a man disturbing the peace right outside his window. Which is why he’s so surprised by how fascinated he is with Cass (Edith Proust), who’s in a one-night vortex. She is rude where he is careful. It’s loud where it’s shy.
Meeting them as we do (naked, he’s on top of her, struggling and then failing to stay inside her) you’d be forgiven for thinking “Else” was a colorful romp in which the comic throws a half-eaten fig on the floor (as he looks on in horror) that was at the forefront And the middle. For a brief moment, “Else” seems to want to immerse us in a manic romance, albeit one set in Anx’s claustrophobic apartment. Just as quickly, Amin suggests that something might be wrong. As a montage of photos posted on social media chronicles their meet-cute at a party the night before, Anx is interested in one detail in a photo that doesn’t show either of them: A man holding some popcorn has some strange bruises on his other hand.
Anx is right to be concerned. Soon news emerges of a strange disease affecting the skin. People mix with everything around them: their phones, sidewalks, even rocks. All Anx can do is lock up his apartment and avoid everyone else. Except, of course, for Cass, who is eager to get over this lockdown with her new lover. However, the intimacy they share together soon becomes threatened by a mysterious force that absorbs everything in its path. That’s when “Else” turns into a horror movie, as Anx and Cass need to fend off whatever it is that exists just outside their apartment, a being that might tell them, in Star Trek’s most famous words, that resistance is futile.
As “Else” leaps from warped daydream romance (with home-video-like visuals to match) to a bleak sci-fi proposition (bleached out in every color, its horrors even more racist), it’s cinematographer Leo Lefebvre who emerges as the film’s MVP. Anx and Cass spend most of the latter part of the film avoiding watchful eyes for fear of being hit by whatever forms a giant squishy mass of things and people outside their room. However, even when such body horror ends up feeling a bit ridiculous, Lefebvre’s camera finds ways to remain captivating. Some of his always restrained black-and-white cinematography has a strange kind of beauty that harkens back to Méliès and Wayne.
It helps that Emin’s film has such a touch. Anx and Cass’s fear blends with their surroundings, and the film’s aesthetic makes us clearly aware of the resilience of their surrounding environment. Objects, landscapes, surfaces, and even skin are depicted with an aloof, unfamiliar look. This is a story about what it means to look at another differently, which in turn teaches us how to do so.
Another might try to be patient as he jumps from one genre to another before landing in sombre contemplation. It’s darkly hilarious (at one point Cass is attacked by a rock monster) and surprisingly cruel (its final act hinges on a myth about lungfish and evolution). Such a tonal strike is deliberately dissonant, but no less annoying. And so, while its lofty ambitions may be tempered by the aesthetic acrobatics that envelop it, Emin’s feature is a strange, wonderful creation that seems cobbled together, untamed yet expansive, like his own fearsome beast.