By Mo Moshaty
The Other (2025) ⭐️⭐️⭐.5
Unable to conceive, a couple seeks to build a family with a young orphan, survivor of a tragic childhood. But their act of love turns to horror when they realize the violence in their foster’s past has returned to destroy the new family.
You know we love a creepy kid….and a creepy mom…and a dad forced to figure it all out. So thank Writer/Director Paul Etheridge for The Other!
When 11-year-old Kathelia (Avangeline Friedlander) arrives at the home of her new adoptive parents, Robin (Olivia Macklin) and Daniel (Daniel McTee), the house feels pristine but unmoving. Its a place where time hasn’t so much passed as been held at arm’s length. Kathelia, a Black child left mute by the loss of her biological family, enters a white suburban home thick with unspoken expectation, a space where a multi-cultural adoption is treated as a neat solution to grief.
Daniel greets her with a careful distance, unsure how to appropriately deal with her silence, while Robin overcompensates, her early warmth quickly sharpening into urgency. When Kathelia doesn’t “settle” into the life Robin has imagined, something in her begins to fray. Macklin plays Robin’s descent like a woman possessed (haha!). Her conviction that Kathelia is “not right” turns into a fixation that something else, something older, might be living inside her.
The film lingers on unsettling details: Robin standing too long at Kathelia’s doorway, the way objects in the house are never moved, Daniel catching fragments of whispers when no one is speaking. Kathelia’s occasional utterances in a strange voice are never explained, keeping the audience consistently disquieted.
Daniel’s quiet bond with Kathelia becomes the film’s heartbeat, though he is often in the dark himself. Etheridge avoids answers, leaving shadows where explanations might be. The question is not whether something is inside Kathelia, but whether it has always been there and whether death, for some, is less an ending than an uninvited return.
NightTide Magazine 
Leave a comment