Main cast: Maika Monroe (Ruth Miller) and Jake Lacy (Harry)
Directors: Dan Berk and Robert Olsen
Hmm, what’s with the rash of folk horror these days? I guess with all the streaming services running out of money after splooging all their cash on dumb things that no sane people want to bother with, they realize it’s cheaper to just make a movie set in the woods instead of renting a scary-looking mansion for the usual scare flick.
Still, Significant Other isn’t as much a pure folk horror film as much as it is an alien movie set in the woods. No, not like the first Predator movie, as the aliens here resemble blue CGI with tentacles but without the creepy pervy undertones.
Ruth and Harry have been together for six years, but she is ridden with all kinds of anxiety issues and has bottles of pills to show for it. She even has a mini-nervous breakdown when Harry proposes, which makes me wonder why she’d even agree to accompany Harry on a camping trip up the Red Ridge Trail.
Then again, she is very hard to like for a character. She uses Harry as her emotional tampon and lashes out at him unfairly whenever she has a panic attack. Oh, he proposes to her? How dare he! He should know that she thinks marriage sucks, and to think he takes the trouble to pick the perfect place to propose—what a selfish prick? Meanwhile, she refuses to admit that she has issues and she agrees with everything her shrink says so long as she gets her pills.
Sadly for Harry, this is still a folk horror film, and the tropes remain. This genre is rarely kind to love interests of the lead female character, so he’s never going to get the closure he deserves.
There’s some karmic payback, I suppose, when Ruth gets stalked and threatened by the alien, but this movie allows her to weaponize the same issues that she refuses to get help for, as if having all kinds of mental issues that cause you to be an ass is somehow a good thing. What is this? A movie to be played on pill poppers’ group hug sessions?
Throughout it all, she shows little empathy to anyone, making me wonder just what Harry sees in her. She also doesn’t warn other campers of the impending alien attack when she has all the opportunity in the world, causing them to get killed.
To add insult to the injury, she has plot armor so thick that she becomes a young adult novel heroine in the end, loved even by aliens because she is so lovable. I have no idea how this wretch can be lovable in the first place, but I didn’t write the script, so don’t look at me.
Once the alien decides to make its move, the movie shifts abruptly from joyless angst to villainous wisecracks galore. Then it is… Jaws? No, wait, now Ruth is pursued by a Terminator-wannabe, and… and… it is as if the people behind this movie decided to shift gears and do another movie in the last 30 minutes, damn whatever happened up to that point.
Maika Monroe is solid in her thankless role as a self-absorbed pill popper, while Jake Lacy does far more work than is needed to make his character endearing. So that’s the plus.
The rest of the movie is a tonal mess with a lead character that doesn’t earn her final girl status in a satisfying manner. The whole thing resembles more of a validation for a depressed, self-destructive neurotic’s unhappy choices in life.
