FrightFest review – Another (2026)
This fits into two overlapping thematic trilogies on view in this year’s FrightFest … like Imposters and The Alice Paradox, it involves reaching into parallel universes to cope (badly) with grief … and like The Death of Us and Mother and Me, it features a writer struggling in traumatic circumstances to produce a follow-up to a best-seller. That there should be these little clutches of films suggests something zeitgeisty, but it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that they are all different in storyline and affect even as they inhabit similar terrain and are driven by a kind of numbed horror at present circumstances and a profound wish things were otherwise even if that cracks the multiverse apart with disastrous consequences.
Here, best-selling novelist Josephine (India de Beaufort, formerly a regular on The Basil Brush Show) is blocked on her follow-up to a beware-what-you-wish-for fantasy hit … at least partially because of the recent death of her physicist husband Ben (Bob Morley, from The 100) in a gruesome road accident which wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t had an argument about her bad experience at a physics seminar he’s dragged her to. A seeming throwaway scene is actually key as a couple of scientists sniff at Josephine’s trivial work on the assumption that they hold secrets of the universe unavailable to those who think in terms of magic. Then, one morning, Josephine wakes up and Ben is alive and trying to convince her that her overactive imagination is responsible for her delusions – with Doug Jones popping in as an unreassuring doctor dishing out pills. Ben is cagey about some things – the cellar door now has an elaborate lock – and glibly keeps coming up with prevarications, explanations and excuses which only underline the wrongnesses. When she calls her agent Gabrielle (Heather Langenkamp), she’s told that no one of that name works for the agency. And there’s a scarfaced woman (Maddi Estrada) lurking in the woods, who leaves a branch with ‘don’t trust him’ scratched on it on the doorstep for Josephine, who doesn’t like to be called Joey though too many people do.
In the basement is a machine which accesses parallel worlds, and it becomes apparent that in this timeline Josephine died in the accident – prompting this Ben to scour the multiverse for an another-way-round reality where he should theoretically find a Josephine who will be as keen as he is to mess with space and time to resume and heal their marriage. Only, of course, it doesn’t work out that way. Imposters is about a mother desperate to replace a lost child, an occasional theme (cf: Inside) in horror, while this is about a husband who doesn’t just want his dead wife back but wants her to be his idea of her rather than her idea of herself … which leads to a Gaslight situation. De Beaufort is extraordinary as the woman in an extracontinual bind, conveying her doubts, hopes and irritations perfectly – while Morley is all the more of a menace for making Ben eager to please (until thwarted) and initially winning (it’s an acute observation that Josephine is attracted to him because he is boyishly enthusiastic about chaos physics – a field she instinctively understands as a fantasy writer though she’s puzzled by the theorems). Of course, it gets complicated – and dark – in the final reels, but like its heroine never gives up on its sense of itself.
Directed by Andy Chen, who also co-wrote with Alexander Hernandez-Maxwell, this is his first feature after a run of short films which includes The Spider. NB: there was a 2014 FrightFest selection called Another (aka Mark of the Witch), so this is genuinely Another …
Best performance by a Basil Brush regular in horror since Derek Fowlds in Tower of Evil (1972)?
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