The Other People had its UK première at FrightFest, 10.50am Monday 25th August
The exteriors and interiors of an ordinary seeming suburban home are covered in police tape and evidence markers – which is to say that Chad McClarnon’s The Other People opens with all the tell-tale signs of a crime scene. Although there is a corpse zipped up into a body bag, the precise nature of the crime remains unclear – but this is not quite as mysterious as a gesture made by the senior investigating officer Jim Craddock (B.D. Boudreaux) who, alone in the kitchen, takes a tin of sliced beets out of the cupboard, pries the lid half off with a can opener, and leaves it on the table like a peculiar propitiatory offering, as though something is haunting the place.
Recently widowed Dr William Marsh (Bryce Johnson) and his daughter Abby (Valentina Lucido) come ready-haunted, still in the throes of grief and loss as they move into a large suburban house. The same day they arrive, William, an academic authority on memory and perception, visits the university where he now has a post and meets the two women who will become important in his life: Emily Craddock (Quinnlan Ashe), who is police officer Jim’s daughter and William’s much younger, obviously adoring lab colleague; and dance teacher Rachel Myers (Lyndie Greenwood), to whom both Abby and William take an instant liking.
A chronology-leaping cut – in a film where time and identity readily slip – rushes us months forward to Abby’s eighth birthday party. By now Rachel has married William and moved in with father and daughter, helping them rebuild their fragile sense of family. The house seems the perfect place for renewal, but the past persists here. The odour of cigarettes lingers from the previous owners, Abby happily spends all her time in her room playing with little Eric (Brayden Mohr), an imaginary friend despite Abby’s insistence that he is real but does not like to be seen. Soon Abby will talk of another invisible figure, the ‘scary man’, who steals into her room and wants to take her away – and so the little girl will refuse to sleep in her own bedroom, which goes from a minor irritation for the sceptical William to a severe disruption of his relations with Rachel, all for something that is not there.
Yet much as Abby stays out of her bedroom, their cantankerous neighbour Wendy Elster (Ashley Crow)
keeps away from her own house, preferring to sleep in the RV parked out front. Soon William and Rachel too notice food and clothes going missing, and catch glimpses of presences in the shadows – although only Rachel, now afflicted with nightmares where she keeps seeing her own ghost, will admit it, while William remains very much locked in the denial stage of both his grief and his perception.
In this ordinary-seeming, slightly sleepy town where people disappear, and as Jim puts it, “bodies turn up… like they’re on sale”, something alarmingly amiss has long since settled in and is now taking over – something invisible and unspeakable, so that even those aware of it are frightened and reluctant to speak of it in more than parables and riddles. Accordingly The Other People is ultimately an enigmatic film, as the legacy of abuse, violence and broken love clings to a place, but proves elusive to capture, eviction or even destruction. These are hungry ghosts, full of cravings for the little pleasures that were once theirs, and doomed to keep replaying their stories alongside those of the living. Meanwhile their otherness is matched by another woman and a replacement mother, as even the living long to refresh their fractured narratives.
McClarnon’s film, co-written with his brother Trey, at times evokes Nicholas McCarthy’s Home (At the Devil’s Door,2014), Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022) and Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb (2023) – as well as Takashi Shimizu’s curse horror Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), in which the angry spirits of an abusive father, his wife and their son all bring harm to anyone who enters their former home. Yet The Other People credits the viewer with sufficient intelligence to follow its narrative convolutions and disorienting leaps in logic to their bitter end without spoonfeeding or clunky exposition, and is all the better for unfurling its uncanny ellipses with a real economy.
Ultimately, what has seemed to be a story of one or two families caught in cycles of a cursed past extends to an entire small-town community, perhaps even to a whole nation, with the police detective in the end, as at the beginning, left bewildered by what has occurred on his turf. After all, if America’s colonial history is a chronicle of property reappropriated, then it is also a ghost story of successive owners maintaining their tenure and repeating their horrors. For here, an entire country can be mapped out by its many scenes of unspeakable crimes, “based”, as text improbably if provocatively states at the film’s beginning, “on real events.”
strap: Chad McClarnon’s disorienting chiller shows a family, a house, a community and a country haunted by the echoes of dysfunction and disrepair
© Anton Bitel
