‘Else’ TIFF Review – Worlds and Bodies Merge in French Virus Film

The term body horror evokes certain types of visuals and visceral responses. Famously associated with directors like David Cronenberg, body horror is used to generate gross-out visuals as easily as it advances the narrative (see: the way Coralie Fargeat uses bodies for her scathing feminist social commentary, The Substance).

Writer/director Thibault Emin uses body horror in a completely different way in Else, a French body horror that concerns a pandemic virus that causes humans to “merge” to their surroundings. The body horror is often horrifying, but when filtered through the romanticism of Else‘s central love story, the visuals lend the film a grandeur that is intimate, poetic, and tragic.

The film opens with an unsatisfying hook-up: it’s the first time Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and Cass (Edith Proust) have sex and he has performance issues. Anx is introverted and anxious, living in a Paris apartment that’s decorated by production designer Gabrielle Desjean like a shrine to his childhood. The space is filled with trinkets and slathered in neon and pastel colours and we will come to realize that it’s his refuge from the world (in fact Anx will only be seen outside his apartment once in the entire film).

Cass is Anx’s opposite: she’s loud, extroverted and rambunctious. In short, they’re perfect for each other, which is good because immediately after their tryst, Paris is put on a three week lockdown. The Army is brought in to sequester people in their homes in the hopes of curbing an outbreak that the news suggests is passed by “empathetic” eyesight (as in: lock eyes with an infected individual and you’re in Phase 1).

The film isn’t a COVID analogy, though the brief scenes of lockdown and isolated neighbours communicating via communal vents and garbage chutes feels eerily familiar. Else, which was written by Emin, Alice Butaud and Emma Sandona, is less interested in the experience of a pandemic than its emotional effect: the film is concerned with how Anx and Cass bond when they’re forced to co-habitate in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. Then, as the film progress and the building begins to converge on its inhabitants, Else morphs into an increasingly surreal nightmare.

More than anything, Else is a visual feast for the eyes. Early in the film cinematographer Léo Lefèvre highlights the layout of Anx’s tiny “bubble” so that when the environment begins to change and contract, the oppression and claustrophobia is palpable.

Despite the fact that what is happening is horrifying, however, it is also undeniably gorgeous. In one of the more evocative creative choices, the film is slowly leeched of colour until it becomes a sumptuous black and white nightmare in its back half.

The body horror elements are also extremely memorable thanks to VFX supervisor Arnaud Leviez and FX makeup artists Florence Thonet and Anne Van Nyen. The evolving nature of the disease is revealed slowly: first bodies are seen on the news, melted into rock like camouflage, then an unhoused man outside Anx’s building fuses with the sidewalk from the waist down.

This is followed by two “attack” sequences in the apartment, one at night and one in the cold light of day. By now the building has lost power, so when Cassie investigates a rocky disturbance under the desk, it is in the limited light generated by Anx via a make-shift generator run by a stationary bike. Lefèvre lights the scene to maximize the tension as Cass reaches into the dark, stretching beyond the limits of the flickering, inconsistent light.

The second attack is even more thrilling, in part because it happens in broad daylight. The lovers hear the whining of Baska, the dog of unseen neighbour Mrs. Setsuko (Lika Minamoto), so they investigate. Emin shoots what follows in a way that is reminiscent of the framing and tension of one of the best scares in M.Night Shyamalan’s The Village. The result is a standout sequence that both acknowledges the impact of the disease and anticipates where the film will go, both visually and narratively.

Even when the film traffics in seismic, world-altering visuals, however, it never loses sight of its core story: its human characters. The relationship between Anx and Cass, so tenuous and transitory at the start of the film, becomes an oasis of its own; as the world quite literally shifts around them, the lovers struggle to hold onto something tangible and real.

Considering the magnitude of these events, their romance could feel infinitesimal. In fact, the reverse is true.

Their love feels like the last real thing in a world that has left human experience behind. In one of the film’s last verbal exchanges, Anx listens as Mrs. Setsuko relates the story of a primordial fish that outgrew its environment. In leaving the water behind to crawl on land, “It chose death,” her disembodied voice explains through the bathroom vent. On land, however, the fish discovered its abnormal size was actually because it had both lungs, as well as gills and “The monster lived” Mrs. Setsuko declares. Only by taking a leap of faith was life able to evolve and thrive.

In Else, the monster is many things: a world-ending virus; a mutated creature lurking in the shadows; a risky escape without guarantee. In the end, however, the film suggests that the biggest threat to human experience, and to Anx and Cass specifically, is a life without love. There’s a real poetry in that.

Else had its world premiere at TIFF 2024. Release info TBD.

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