Home From Home
Another
Directed by Andy Chen
USA 2026
28th August Screening at FrightFest
Okay, so my third pick from FrightFest this year was Another… and I picked this because the summary hinted that it would be a physics based journey into parallel worlds. I’ll say up front this will be a short review and I’ll also say it’s technically accomplished for a small budget piece. You usually see a fair few bad, amateurish looking films popping up at these festivals, it’s par for the course but, this year all the films I saw looked professionally put together.
All that being said, I found myself a little disappointed with this one. Yes, it does, as I’d guessed, deal with accessing parallel worlds but… and I can’t really blame the writer for this… the science of the thing is as ignored as it would be in any 50s B-movie, with a scenery chewing professor and a bunch of Ken Strickfadden gadgets back then. Which is what the film essentially is, I guess.
Now, I was really enjoying this for the first 20 minutes or so, with strong performances from India de Beaufort as a best selling writer struggling to land her second novel after losing her husband in a brutal car accident... and also from Bob Morley as said husband. These actors have you believing in the characters as people right from the get go and their efforts in this set up a nice, sturdy playing field to lay out the rest of the movie.
Unfortunately, for this audience member at least (and it may be because at this point I’m older and very jaded to this kind of thing), the film failed to bring much of anything new to the narrative and so I found myself constantly second guessing the story and, it turns out, getting it right each time. Even to the point where I could pretty much predict roughly what the last shot of the movie would be.
It doesn’t really help matters that the film does seem to be telegraphing itself so that, every time a new ‘revelation’ is made, you already figured it out ten minutes prior to that.
Now, there was one sequence I liked which did take me by surprise, featuring a creature in a door in a tree but the sting was soon taken out of this because a) that sequence turns out to be a dream in the mind of de Beaufort’s character and b) it needlessly made very blatant the obvious metaphor at the heart of the narrative, where the writer character’s fictional works are a parallel for the ‘bad science experiment’ which drives the story. So it did feel a little like the film makers were trying to beat you over the head with it by this point.
And, another short review I’m afraid but that’s me just about done with Another. The director listed Christopher Nolan as being an influence on his work during the inevitable Q & A session at the end of the screening and, I couldn’t help but think, yeah, The Prestige was a similarly obvious movie which fell into exactly the same kind of traps this one did. So, yeah, that’s that with me and this film, I think.
