‘L’autre’ Review: An Uneven Yet Relatable Journey Through the Horrors of the Healthcare System [TIFF]

If you live long enough, you will one day have a horrid hospital experience. I have. Many of my friends/family have. So has Canadian filmmaker Alexandre Franchi, as he mentioned during the introduction at TIFF to his latest film, L’autre. Part medical drama, part dark comedy, and part paranoid body horror thriller, it’s a genre mashup that explores the trials and tribulations of the healthcare system through an uneven yet mostly relatable lens.

Following a gruesome surgery, we meet Stan (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). A cancer patient, Stan has just had a tumor removed from his leg, left with a rod in its place. With his foot swollen like a balloon, he must stay confined to his hospital bed for at least five days while he recovers. On that first night, a gunshot victim arrives as Stan’s new roommate. Believed to be a gang member, he’s supposed to be in a coma, but at night, he threatens and mocks our protagonist, warning that if he tells he’s faking, he’ll have Stan’s family murdered. That’s just the beginning of the poor bastard’s problems, as Stan finds himself drifting into a paranoid psychosis where he can no longer tell what’s real, all while his life falls apart around him.

You’re reading this on a horror site, so let me start by saying, L’autre is not a horror movie, at least, not in the traditional sense. A blend of genres, it’s more of a sad character study about a writer who discovers he doesn’t have the courage to fight cancer, unlike the protagonists of countless triumphant stories. Though there are moments of horror, such as graphic flashes of Stan’s surgery and the paranoid terror that someone is coming to hurt him, those fears take a backseat to his confrontation with his inability to be the fighter everyone tells him he is.

No, the horror of L’autre comes more from the film’s observation of just how miserable and incompetent the healthcare system is, no matter where you are in the world. Some places are better than others, sure, but I doubt anyone anywhere would call it perfectly functional. And in Franchi’s film, if it can go wrong, it mostly certainly does. Stan’s insurance “guarantees” him a private room (he doesn’t get it). Nurses mess up his meds. Doctors don’t listen to him. In every other scene, whether by accident or intent, he experiences searing pain. What’s supposed to be a place meant to heal him instead becomes a never-ending barrage of mental and physical torture.