Else

Introverted and uncomfortable in his own skin, Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) does not consider himself an obvious partner for Cass (Édith Proust), the feisty whirlwind of confidence he finds himself waking up alongside after a presumed one night stand. And yet a romance begins to bloom. However, the nascent relationship is threatened when a strange disease begins to spread throughout the world, gradually causing the infected to merge with whatever they touch. Finding themselves quarantined to Anx’s claustrophobic apartment, the couple is soon besieged by their very surroundings, which have begun coalescing with their neighbours into a spongy new life form that seeks to add the lovers to its mass.

Even before the body-horror emerges in Thibault Emin’s mesmerizing debut feature, the film envelopes its characters in an anxious haptic soundscape of sticky, squelchy friction as Anx and Cass navigate each other, be it through probing conversation or intimate consummation. And as an apocalypse encroaches upon them, genre thrills emerge with the appearance of grotesque creatures whose disturbingly fractured depiction is liable to raise the hairs on the arms of the audience — provided they haven’t already crawled out of their skin from the eerie foley.

Further mutating towards a philosophical climax that blends existential dread with transcendental awe, Else recalls a rather literal interpretation of the Modern English lyric “I’ll stop the world and melt with you,” as it profoundly articulates a unique vision of the end of everything, and how it may, in fact, just be the start of something new.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: nudity, sexual content, mature themes