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To want to be one with the other is at once an impossibly romantic proposition and an utterly frightening one. In his feature film debut “Else,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, director Thibault Emin flirts with the romcom trappings of the former but soon plunges headfirst into the disorienting possibilities of the latter. Anchored by the tale of a budding couple facing an increasingly inescapable threat from the outside world, the film mostly takes place in an apartment that’s equal parts safe haven and prison cell. A tad too heady but quite visually arresting, Emin’s dream-turn-nightmare body horror film is as much a lockdown pandemic fable as it is a philosophical treatise on individuality.

The aptly named Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) is an anxious mess of a man. His bedroom is decorated with the brazenness of a child and he struggles, we soon learn, with creating lasting intimacy with other adults.

There is a pretty good chance that a film like “Else,” the fascinating feature debut from director Thibault Emin that’s an extension of his short of the same name, is going to fly under the radar for many. This is a real shame because those who see it will find that not only does this film grow on you, but it burrows inside your very skin. Remaining mostly confined to one apartment as the world falls apart due to an unknown epidemic that’s taking hold, “Else” is a film you watch in a combination of awe and horror. As we see in all its gruesome glory what this disease can do to us, the film takes a plunge into something hauntingly beautiful. It’s a movie about the forces that consume anything and everything to make them into something that is a part of a collective. The more it expands on this,...

For director Thibault Emin’s shocking and melancholy feature debut, “Else” reimagines the “call coming from inside the house” as the very atoms making up the house itself.

What begins as an overstayed welcome between two new lovers — awkwardly fooling around in the path of a metaphysical apocalypse — blooms into a surreal, ever-scarier, and ever-changing look at the emotion of transhumanism. That’s the belief that our species will eventually evolve into something else and, at least as theorized here, could include not only your sentient one-night stand but any bedroom furniture they’ve been lounging on as well.

This French body horror, premiered at TIFF Midnight Madness, smartly doubles as a requiem for the identities we lose to messy connections forged in times of dire need. The narrative is overthought and can appear almost too stylish at points, with a vivid color palette that snaps into black-and-white midway before turning yellow by the end.

The term body horror evokes certain types of visuals and visceral responses. Famously associated with directors like David Cronenberg, body horror is used to generate gross-out visuals as easily as it advances the narrative.

Writer/director Thibault Emin uses body horror in a completely different way in Else, a French body horror that concerns a pandemic virus that causes humans to “merge” to their surroundings. The body horror is often horrifying, but when filtered through the romanticism of Else‘s central love story, the visuals lend the film a grandeur that is intimate, poetic, and tragic.

The film opens with an unsatisfying hook-up: it’s the first time Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and Cass (Edith Proust) have sex and he has performance issues. Anx is introverted and anxious, living in a Paris apartment that’s decorated by production designer Gabrielle Desjean like a shrine to his childhood. The space is filled...

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 Emin is taking that sentiment to the extreme — with a horrifying twist.

Emin makes his directorial debut with “Else,” a body horror romance feature about a strange epidemic that causes the infected to melt into their surroundings. Emin 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 Substance, a feminist horror pic where Demi Moore plays an aging Hollywood star who embraces a secret cloning procedure to save her career will open the Midnight Madness sidebar at the Toronto Film Festival with a North American premiere, organizers said Thursday.

The Cannes award winner from director Coralie Fargeat also stars Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid, and will hit theaters on Sept. 20.

The Midnight Madness section, which launched the career of Eli Roth with Cabin Fever and saw Sacha Baron Cohen arrive in a cart pulled by donkeys to screen Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, booked in all 10 genre movies with chills and thrills for this year’s 2024 lineup.

The program that has film buyers and Hollywood execs staying up after midnight plans world premieres for Thibault Emin’s fantasy pic Else, which stars Matthieu Sampeur and Edith Proust and imagines...