Editorials
‘Significant Other’ – One of the Most Surprising Horror Movies of the Year
The new horror movie Significant Other asks the question, “Is camping in the vast wilderness truly scary?” Despite Harry (Jake Lacy) trying to assure his anxious girlfriend (Maika Monroe) that everything’s okay, the actual answer to that question is of course, yes…
It has been an exciting year for horror fans. Besides the return of several beloved franchises, original movies like the recent Smile, Barbarian, and notably, gore fest Terrifier 2 are doing bigger numbers. Hidden among the new, original horror is another new movie that’s one of the most interesting, and surprising of the year.
Robert Olsen and Dan Berk’s film can’t be labeled or cornered into a box because it’s not simply one kind of movie. It transforms into several throughout; each time, unexpectedly.
The film opens with the image of a red star falling from the sky, followed by an off-putting, Predator style sound slithering through the woods, which makes its way towards a nearby deer.
Immediately after, we meet Harry and Ruth. A couple of six years, on their way to a camping trip – planned by Harry -in the beautiful Pacific Northwest wilderness.
The setting is its own character- symbolizing Ruth’s plaguing fear of the unknown. A later shot blended from the couple fireside at night into a sea of trees beautifully captures the expansive silence surrounding them.
The duo are briefly explored (mostly at surface level) but enough to get their dynamics. Harry is charming, if not a little awkward. But he’s committed, and planning to propose on top of a picturesque mountain.
Ruth- more quiet, and prone to anxiety- is less eager to settle down, partially due to her parents’ divorce. But she’s also unnerved, seemingly aware of something ominous. Harry subsides her fears by explaining there’s more danger in her preferred activity of surfing than their present hiking adventure.
Eventually, he proposes as planned, and Ruth responds by having a panic attack. She later explains, “I’m with you because I love you – isn’t that enough?”
Her views on love and relationships are more fluid, and lax, and Ruth tells Harry, “Some day you’re gonna change; maybe that new version of you will love me, maybe it won’t.”
The opening half hour of Significant Other is quiet. The vast Oregon woods, combined with the couple’s dampened mood post-proposal, illustrates a mysterious, atmospheric tone that’s jolted by several jump scares – four to be exact – reciprocated between Harry and Ruth, who each take several solo walks through the woods. And while mostly basic, they’re each effective; brilliantly reflecting a feeling of paranoia, mistrust, and subtly asking the question, “Do we ever really know our partners?”
Ruth stumbles onto the same deer from the beginning on one of her walks. It’s been ripped apart and covered in a weird substance. During a later walk, she wanders into a cave, and is scared by something not visible to us. After this, she’s different.
The movie takes its first big turn here- feeling like a meditation on relationships and mental health. Brian De Palma style split-focus diopter shots of the couple illustrate how disjointed they are from one another with effectively created tension.
Harry, alarmed, says she’s always stressed, and she seems paranoid. But what is Ruth hiding? And what did she find in the cave?
Maika Monroe has perfected the smart, suspicious female and she does it again here with quiet depth. The crinkles and muscle movements of her face and forehead poetically replace dialogue, and say so much – without actually telling us anything.
The next day Ruth tells Harry she’ll accept his proposal but she wants to recreate it. He does, she accepts, and then pushes him off the mountain to his death, and runs away. After passing out, she’s found and helped by another couple hiking nearby.
Here, Significant Other takes its second drastic, unexpected twist, going from A24 style mystery to supernatural sci-fi horror.
The rest of the movie is an epic battle that goes in many surprising directions – and culminates in another twist that transforms the genre again. This time to body horror – reminiscent of movies like Under the Skin, and Hulu’s Blumhouse original Tentacles.
Other horror movies are of understated importance here, and their influences are clearly scattered throughout the movie. From the above body horror, and De Palma references, there are also elements of Terminator 2, Body Snatchers – and even shark movies.
Essentially, it’s about the monsters we battle- both the outward forces, and the inward ones. It plays with the notion that we never truly know our partners – or importantly, even ourselves.
Ruth battled her demons long before we met her, and she changes a lot through the course of the movie; but she still can’t escape herself. And her wide range of emotions are built up by Monroe with subdued effectiveness.
In fact, directing duo Berk and Olsen, who worked with Maika on Villains, said they wrote the part specifically for her- and had her real personality in mind while doing it.
Monroe’s quiet performance is balanced by Jake Lacy’s now signature wit and humor – he builds up to it here with levels of accurate, yet shocking proportions.
What makes Significant Other most surprising is its unwillingness to play by the typical horror movie rules. That’s also what makes it one of the year’s best. It refuses to be relegated to one set thing, instead seamlessly moving between several genres and endlessly playing with our expectations. Even up until the end, its non conventional conclusion raises more questions than answers.
Most of all, it does all this in an easily digestible 84 minutes. In the movie’s short run, it manages to challenge our assumptions of what it is – always staying a step ahead. Personally, I’d prefer a longer movie that continues, and explains more of the story. But in an hour and 24 minutes Significant Other delivers a fun, original idea that’s one of the best horror movies of 2022.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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