Heavily fermented films born from Covid claustrophobia are still coming out of the woodwork – quite literally in the case of this visually arresting Gallic number, in which two shut-ins find themselves under attack by an entity that has grown out of the wooden slats with which one of them has barricaded the apartment windows. This isn’t your average pandemic thriller; here, the infected meld with inorganic material in their surroundings, until their outward contours and their personhood are gone.
Thibault Emin’s film starts with a little whiff of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen. After their one-night stand, hypochondriac Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and impertinent Cass (Edith Proust) find themselves bunkered up in one corner of a madcap apartment block. They banter with the other residents – gruff Mr Mouaki (Toni d’Antonio) and his family, an enigmatic Japanese tenant (Lika Minamoto) holed up with her dog – down the waste-disposal chutes. Observing the unfolding martial-law response over the internet, they feel safely cocooned, until Cass notices a strange accumulation of pebbles underneath Anx’s furniture.
After an opening half-hour of somewhat wearing heavy quirks (such as Cass calling her clitoris “Ingeborg”), Else quickly mutates into something stranger and deeper. At first it’s hard to fathom what connects the romance and the pestilence plotlines, but as the pair pore over each other’s bodies – and, around them, the animate and inanimate, the psychological and the physical, the internal and the external intermingle – the film’s meaning coheres. With the malady seemingly transmitted by staring a host directly in the eye, Emin seems to be saying that the horrors of intimacy are the only way to evolve.
This reality collapse is thrillingly charted in a sprint through multiple visual registers. The preamble’s handheld-shot flatmate badinage moves to blurry nightmare spurts as the rock golem attacks; then to lacquered monochrome sci-fi; and AI-esque mind secretions when things get really weird. Generally surrealistic and elliptical with dialogue, Else shows a heartening faith in the affective power of imagery over talk. A digital-age kindred spirit of the likes of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, this is the midnight movie real deal.
• Else is on digital platforms from 2 March.
