THE STORY – A cancer surgery patient faces both imagined threats and real perils during recovery.
THE CAST – Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Bilel Chegrani, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman, Nahéma Ricci, Marc Messier, Benoît Gouin & Maxime Genois
THE TEAM – Alexandre Franchi (Director/Writer) & Simon Lavoie (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 98 Minutes
There’s something deeply uncomfortable about being stuck in a hospital bed with someone else’s crisis playing out three feet away. Alexandre Franchi’s “L’autre” builds its entire film around that discomfort. The film traps its protagonist, and by extension the audience, inside a single room. It uses that confinement to push Stan (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) toward the edge of his sanity as he unravels with nowhere to go. But the same claustrophobia that makes the film effective also makes it a slog in places. The film loses its thread as often as its protagonist does, and there are stretches where the disorientation stops feeling purposeful and starts feeling like boredom.
Stan, an ad copywriter with fantasy-novel ambitions, is recovering from surgery to remove a cancerous section of bone in his leg. He’s drugged, restless, and only half-present, buzzing for more morphine and flinching whenever a nurse or his girlfriend Bénédicte (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) reminds him he’s still alive. Franchi – working from his own brush with cancer – doesn’t sand down the indignities of recovery: the swollen foot nearly caught in an elevator door, the catheter yanked loose, the mortifying attempt to use a bedpan interrupted by friends walking in mid-struggle. This recovery is not dignified, and the film is better for refusing to pretend otherwise. But there is also an element of black comedy, which announces itself immediately as the film opens on a hand reaching toward light, angel imagery, Wagner’s “Parsifal” swelling in its quest for the Holy Grail. Then, we cut straight into surgery, where the surgeon, mid-incision through tendon and bone, casually asks who put the music on. It’s a funny needle-drop of a joke that deflates the operatic self-seriousness of the opening images, and it sets the tone for the film’s best gags: doctors who say the worst possible thing to a man in recovery, delivered completely straight-faced.
There are also moments of extreme tension, built by Stan being cooped up in a hospital room with a roommate. Darius (Bilel Chegrani), brought in comatose after a shooting, turns out to be faking it, using the middle of the night to plot revenge against whoever put him there. Stan overhears enough to become a liability, and the two men settle into a slow burn duel that nobody around Stan believes is actually happening. It’s a clever premise, and Chegrani plays Darius with enough menace to make it convincing. The trouble is that the tension between the two men circles and circles without ever quite reaching the boiling point it keeps promising.
That circling is really the film’s central problem. Franchi has clearly built the whole thing around Stan’s disintegrating grip on reality: the hallucinated visions of running free of the hospital, the shadow of Darius rising behind the privacy curtain, the flashbacks to waking up mid-surgery. There’s real ambition in trying to make the film’s structure mirror Stan’s scrambled headspace. But ambition and execution aren’t the same, and the movie’s looseness starts to read less like a formal choice and more like a lack of shape. It starts to drag, and the humor that carries the opening stretches thins out just when the film needs it most to cut the tedium.
The emotional throughline of Stan’s mother – who died in this same hospital after a decade fighting the disease he now has – is the film’s most promising and most squandered idea. Stan needs to be as strong as she was, his fantasy-writer’s fixation on heroism as a way to avoid what actually happened to her. But the film gestures at that grief rather than sitting with it. It is preoccupied with what makes someone a hero without examining what that costs him. The satirical jabs at an overstretched, understaffed Canadian hospital system land better because they’re throwaway and genuinely funny even as they speak to something depressingly true. The mother material needed to avoid being a throwaway element of the plot.
Cardinal is doing great work here, tracking Stan’s slide from irritable patient to something closer to unraveling. Steve Asselin’s camera finds inventive ways to visualize a mind coming apart without ever leaving the room. It’s a film built entirely around one man’s reckoning with mortality, but the shifting genres and tones never quite let that reckoning come into focus. “L’autre” is oddly reluctant to let Stan actually sit with anything; it would rather stay high on morphine than come down and look at what it’s really about.
