If there’s one reason for horror fans to check out writer/director Alexandre Franchi’s L’AUTRE, it’s the medical horror. The film opens with an extended surgery sequence, filmed in gory close-up with excruciating foley work, as protagonist Stan (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) has the bones in his kneecap and lower leg surgically removed and replaced. It is incredibly visceral and difficult to watch, and a great way to open a movie.
Stanislav is a writer with an aggressive form of bone cancer. Even after his surgery, his doctor doesn’t offer much of a hopeful prognosis: Stan’s body could easily reject the anti-cancer rod they inserted as a substitute; the risk of infection is high; and even if everything heals well, it’s still likely he’s only bought himself around five years.
With all of these mitigating factors, it’s no wonder that the rest of L’AUTRE plays out like a paranoid mid-life crisis around death and mortality. The film is purportedly based on a real-life traumatic hospital stay by Franchi, who does a nightmarishly good job of mining the horrors, discomforts, and inconveniences of the modern medical system, all while exploring Stan’s fragile state of mind following his life-changing surgery.
The title L’AUTRE loosely translates to The Other, which is where the more traditional (ie: genre) source of conflict comes from. Soon after Stan’s surgery, he acquires a roommate: gang member Darius (Bilel Chegrani), who was shot by the police and is in a coma.
Or so everyone says.
When no one else is around, Darius awakens to threaten to hurt or even kill Stan, as well as his girlfriend Bénédicte (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and her sister Fleur (Nahéma Ricci). But the threats only happen when the two men are alone, and Stan is on a lot of painkillers that call into question what he’s experiencing. The rest of the movie plays up the tension between whether Stan is, in fact, an unreliable narrator, or if he and his loved ones are actually in danger.
As far as conflicts go, this is relatively straightforward fare, and while the single location hospital room is clearly meant to feel claustrophobic, L’AUTRE occasionally just feels limited in scope. Franchi and cinematographer Steve Asselin help alleviate this by keeping the camera moving and varying their shot composition. This results in several striking visuals, such as a sequence where shadow and light make it seem as though Darius is looming over Stan behind the dividing curtain.
Even when Darius isn’t the threat, however, Stan is subjected to a thousand forms of discomfort thanks to a system that is both too crowded and chronically understaffed. From mixed-up medical charts and wrong medicine, to catheters getting pulled on, to nearly having his injured foot caught in an elevator door, Stan’s stay is just one messed up incident after another.
Anchoring everything is Cardinal, who appears onscreen for the entire film. Relegated to a bed for the movie’s runtime, Stan is, by default, a reactive character, but Cardinal imbues him with nothing but pain, rage, and desperation. The character may be physically immobile, but Cardinal has no difficulty conveying Stan’s struggles with his own mortality, his loss of agency, and what the future holds for him as a man, a boyfriend, and a wannabe father.
In that last capacity, Franchi does use a narrative and visual crutch to explore Stan’s complicated history with cancer and death. Early on, it is revealed that the character’s mother also died of the disease, and there are repeated dream sequences where Stan either remembers his mother or flees, as an adult, from the hospital in order to escape into the woods.
These moments aren’t bad, but they do come off a bit cliché, particularly when they dovetail into Stan’s strained relationship with his father and the fights Stan picks with Bénédicte about their future together. It should be good character work, but at times it just feels like the film is spinning its wheels and covering the same ground again.
What works best are the satirical elements that poke fun at everything from the gaps in the medical system to the way that people don’t know how to interact with the sick and dying. One of the strongest recurring gags is how everyone advises Stan to read a reductive book about staying positive while battling cancer. At best he finds it trite; at worst, it’s condescending. Either way, each time it pops up, the cancer book is a good bit.
Ultimately, while the threat posed by Darius isn’t always the most original or compelling source of conflict and the film’s limited scope occasionally feels too contained, it’s hard to deny the visceral impact of L’AUTRE. Ironically, the clear take-away is that the hospital is the least safe place for Stan to be. As a slice of medical horror – especially for anyone who has endured a traumatic stay within the chaos of the public health system- L’AUTRE is definitely triggering.
L’AUTRE had its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Release info TBD.
