L'AUTRE

Anyone who has spent too long in a hospital bed will connect with the experience of the increasingly agitated protagonist in Alexandre Franchi’s third feature, a darkly comedic thriller about a mind and body in peril. 

An actor most recently seen by Festival audiences in Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love (TIFF ’23), Pierre-Yves Cardinal stars as Stan, an ad man and aspiring fantasy author who’s recovering in a hospital in Quebec from a surgery to remove a cancerous section of bone in his leg. Addled by pain medication and largely immobilized due to his struggle to adapt to his metal knee prosthesis, Stan spends his waking hours weathering the many intrusive visits from doctors, nurses, and concerned loved ones like his girlfriend Bénédicte (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman, Falcon Lake, TIFF ’22) and her sardonic sister Fleur (Nahéma Ricci, Antigone, TIFF ’19). 

This patient’s grasp on reality is already shaky when he gets an unwelcome roommate: Darius (Bilel Chegrani, La Gravité, TIFF ’22), a young man in a coma following a shooting. As the newcomer becomes the focus of Stan’s increasingly wild delusions, viewers are driven to wonder what dangers he’s actually facing.

Inspired in large part by his own experience with cancer, Franchi has crafted a film experience that’s uniquely visceral, sometimes harrowing, and continually surprising. And while much of the action is confined to Stan’s hospital room, the film maintains the same bristling energy and inventive flair that distinguished The Wild Hunt, which won the director the award for Best Canadian First Feature at TIFF in 2009. 

JASON ANDERSON

Content advisory: coarse language, mature themes, medical trauma, violence