Another review – Pandemic-style horror makes bad guys crawl out of the woodwork, literally | film

HEasily intoxicating films born of Covid claustrophobia are still coming out of the woodwork — exactly in the case of this visually arresting, expensive number, in which two shut-ins find themselves under attack by an entity that has grown from the wooden slats one of them has barricaded the apartment windows with. This is not your average pandemic thriller; Here, infected people mix with inorganic materials in their surroundings, until their external features and personality disappear.

Thibault Emin’s film begins with a whiff of the delicatessen of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. After a one-night stand, the obsessive Anx (Mathieu Sambor) and the sassy Cass (Edith Proust) find themselves hiding in the corner of a crazy apartment building. They joke around with the other residents — the gruff Mr. Mawaki (Tony D’Antonio) and his family, and the mysterious Japanese tenant (Leika Minamoto) who’s holed up with her dog — down the garbage disposal chutes. Monitoring the martial law reaction online, they feel safe, until Cas notices a strange buildup of gravel under Anx’s furniture.

After an opening half-hour of somewhat heavy-handed quirks (such as Cass calling her clitoris “Ingeborg”), Else quickly turns into something kinky and deeper. At first, it’s hard to understand what connects the romantic plots and the pandemic, but as the couple explores each other’s bodies — and around them, the animal and the inanimate, the psychological and the physical, the internal and the external, mingle — the film’s meaning coheres. With the disease apparently transmitted by staring directly into the host’s eyes, Amin seems to be saying that the horrors of intimacy are the only way to evolve.

This realistic collapse is drawn dramatically in a sprint across multiple visual registers. The hand-depicted Badinage in the preamble moves into blurry, nightmarish mutants when the rock golem attacks; Then to polished monochromatic sci-fi; And AI-like mind secretions when things get really weird. Overall surreal and elliptical with dialogue, Else displays an encouraging belief in the emotional power of images to speak. Digital Zeitgeist Similar to the likes of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, this is the real deal at Midnight Movie.