Joe Lispett joins Conrad for coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), kicking off with L'Autre, the third feature from Quebec's Alexandre Franchi, arriving 8 years after Happy Face and seventeen after his TIFF-winning debut The Wild Hunt, so he's clearly a director who prefers to make people wait.
Pierre-Yves Cardinal (Tom at the Farm) plays Stan, laid up in hospital after cancer surgery and already fraying at the edges from sheer boredom, when Darius (Bilel Chegrani) gets wheeled into the other bed following a shooting. He's supposed to be in a coma, but Stan can hear him making threats... Is it the cancer? The drugs? Or something else?
It's billed as visceral and darkly comedic, which is festival-speak for \"someone's grip on reality is about to slip and we'll enjoy watching it happen.\" We'll grant this one honorary genre status even though it's shelved as a comedy thriller rather than straight horror, because two men trapped in a room while one of them slowly convinces himself the other is trying to kill him is a premise we're all familiar with. Besides, there's graphic surgery footage!
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