Have you ever wanted to be so wrapped up in your partner, it’s as if you could just melt into them? Well, filmmaker Thibault Ebin is taking that sentiment to the extreme — with a horrifying twist.
Ebin makes his directorial debut with “Else,” a body horror romance feature about a strange epidemic that causes the infected to melt into their surroundings. Ebin is a French director and screenwriter, who is expanding his 2007 short film “Else” into a feature that has been more than 15 years in the making. He co-wrote the script with Alice Butaud and Emma Sandona.
“Else” will have its world premiere at TIFF as part of the Midnight Madness program. The film is a sales title and hails from France and Belgium.
The official synopsis reads: “Introverted and uncomfortable in his own skin, Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) does not consider himself an obvious partner for Cass (Édith Proust), the feisty whirlwind of confidence he finds himself waking up alongside after a presumed one night stand. And yet a romance begins to bloom. However, the nascent relationship is threatened when a strange disease begins to spread throughout the world, gradually causing the infected to merge with whatever they touch. Finding themselves quarantined to Anx’s claustrophobic apartment, the couple is soon besieged by their very surroundings, which have begun coalescing with their neighbors into a spongy new life form that seeks to add the lovers to its mass.”
Director Ebin said in a press statement that “Else” is his answer to the “great fear that inhabits most Western fantasy films: the fear of the Other, the fear of the loss of identity, and its dissolution into the ‘great undifferentiated mass.’”
That fear is what Ebin exhibits literally onscreen in a David Cronenberg-esque way that elevates a “pro-mutation” sensibility; or, as Ebin explained, when the “natural and the artificial disappear.”
Damien Lagogue and Benoit Roland produce the film, with Les Produits Frais and Wrong Men as the production companies.
Coralie Fargeat’s viral Cannes feature “The Substance” makes its North American debut opening the Midnight Madness section. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich deemed the film an “instant classic.”
Other Midnight Madness titles include “Dead Mail,” co-directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy;
“Dead Talents Society” helmed by John Hsu; Yang LI’s “Escape from the 21st Century”; Andrew DeYoung’s “Friendship”; Joseph Kahn’s “Ick”; Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti’s “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This”; Kenichi Ugana’s “The Gesuidouz”; and Timo Tjahjanto’s “The Shadow Strays.”
“Else” premieres September 9 at TIFF. The film is looking for distribution with WTFilms handling sales. Check out the teaser below.
