Else, strange and daring tale on our mutant identities (critic)

An epidemic merges humans and objects in this French film with mad inventiveness.

You will resume a slice of horror body ? In tune with a new generation of French filmmakers wondering about our mutant identities (from the Julia Ducournau Titanium to the Fargeat Coralie of The substance), Thibault Emin films in Else The camera of a couple threatened by an epidemic who sees humans merge with objects. The film-adapted from its eponymous short film shot in 2007-begins like a pink candy comedy, with a light and wacky tone, almost a satire of our confined lives during the pandemic of Covid-19, where a couple cut in the world (Matthieu Sampeur and Edith Proust) gets to know each other and to love each other while taking the measure of the catastrophe. Then the anxiety will settle down little by little, the threat takes more and more magnitude, and the film turns into a black and white nightmare.

Conte on a world in full metamorphosis where beings, contaminated with a simple look, can be aptly with the bitumen of a sidewalk or any everyday object (you never watch your sheets again in the same way), Else is a film that also projects before our eyes, changes as the formation of form and texture progresses. With remarkable plastic inventiveness, Thibault Emin built an increasingly suffocating camera, full of romanticism, which manages to combine the influences of filmmakers as different as David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, Michel Gondry (for the DIY side and Do-it-yourself) or the caro and young Delicatesen (for the picturesque description of a Parisian building that goes into spinning). Unpublished, very risky, miraculously successful: a real mad scientist transplant.

De Thibault Emin. With Matthieu Sampeur, Edith Proust, Lika Minamoto… Duration: 1h42. In theaters on May 28.