The Other People (2025) Review
The Other People (2025) Review
The Horror Collective, the genre label of Studio Dome, will release the acclaimed psychological horror thriller THE OTHER PEOPLE, the directorial debut of Chad McClarnon from a script written with his brother Trey, on digital platforms September 15.
THE OTHER PEOPLE has been celebrated on the festival circuit, earning the Audience Award at the Nashville Film Festival, the Special Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the deadCenter Film Festival, the Best Screenplay award at La Samhain du Cinéma Fantastique, and a Best Narrative Feature nomination at the Rome International Film Festival. The Hollywood News praised the film for its innovation “McClarnon has created an intense haunted house movie that spins conventions on its head,” highlighting Greenwood’s stellar lead performance.
In a town plagued with sudden deaths and missing persons, Rachel (Greenwood) meets and quickly marries grieving single dad William, and the two set out to provide a stable, comfortable life for his troubled eight-year-old daughter Abby. When Abby makes friends with a boy that lives in the hidden corners of their new home, she learns why things that live in the dark don’t want to be seen. As Rachel strives to understand and face the terror that grips Abby, William becomes more self-involved.
Losing sleep, fighting to save her marriage and her stepdaughter, Rachel grows increasingly suspicious of the strange noises and ghoulish shadows scratching at the edges of her sanity. Faced with unspeakable tragedy, Rachel has no choice but to press beyond what she can bear if they have any hope to survive.
Inspired by disturbing true events, The Other People proves to be a languid and prolonged endurance test, the kind of film where the plot can seemingly only breathe and move forward if its protagonists repeatedly make incredibly stupid decisions. And, boy, do they!
At the centre of the story is a couple whose daughter repeatedly tells them that strangers have been visiting her. Naturally, they dismiss this as nothing more than an imaginary friend. That might just about be understandable initially, but even when the child explains that a man, she believed to be her daddy tried to pick her up and carry her away, the parents still fail to take her seriously. That is not exactly the sort of thing most children would casually invent about an imaginary friend, yet the warning signs continue to be ignored.
Then there is a subplot involving William cheating on Rachel, which feels almost entirely superfluous, adding little to the story other than yet more unnecessary running time. Senior Officer Jim Craddock (B.D. Boudreaux) appears to know that something seriously sinister is happening yet has somehow decided that now is the appropriate time to confront ‘the other people’. Quite why he has waited until this point is anyone’s guess.
Of the mysterious ‘other people’, only one gets to interact directly with the other characters, and she spends much of her screen time cackling manically like one of the possessed from Sam Raimi’s original The Evil Dead. Whatever atmosphere the film manages to establish is quickly undermined by the relentless cackling, which eventually becomes less unsettling and more an assault on the viewer’s patience.
The characters’ behaviour becomes increasingly baffling as events unfold. When a child goes missing, the parents are, understandably, beside themselves with worry. Yet, give it a little while and they are calmly eating takeaway food before proceeding to have sex on their kitchen floor. It is the sort of tonal whiplash that makes it difficult to take the supposed horror seriously.
William is, without question, the most frustrating character of the lot. He repeatedly refuses to listen, first to his daughter and then to Rachel, despite the increasingly obvious evidence that something is seriously wrong. In all the films I have watched over the years, his character ranks remarkably high among the most stupid and irritating I have encountered. There is absolutely nothing remotely likeable about him.
To be fair, this is not a criticism of the actor, who is perfectly likeable; it is the character he has been given to play that is so thoroughly infuriating.
And then there is the character who is specifically told by Craddock not to return to the house. Naturally, guess where they go.
That, in a nutshell, is The Other People: people not listening, people making incredibly poor decisions, and people repeatedly ignoring increasingly obvious warning signs despite strange and disturbing things happening inside their own home. The characters continually plod onwards when any remotely sensible person would be running in the opposite direction.
Speaking of plodding, the film itself certainly does plenty of that. At a pace resembling a snail travelling uphill, The Other People stretches its premise far beyond what it can comfortably sustain. There are potentially some intriguing ideas buried within its disturbing true-event inspiration, but they become increasingly difficult to appreciate beneath the film’s sluggish pacing, frustrating characters and seemingly endless parade of questionable decisions.
Ultimately, The Other People proves to be less a frightening descent into supernatural terror and more a test of the viewer’s patience. When the characters are repeatedly presented with warning signs and respond by doing precisely the opposite of what any sensible person would do, the resulting frustration becomes considerably more pronounced than the intended fear.
THE OTHER PEOPLE will be available on major digital platforms beginning September 15, 2026.
