Spooky season is on fire! You know that we love horror genre and the odd portion of scares, so today we will talk about Significant Other, a movie that will make you grab the blanket very tight due to the tension. Ready?
Here we go!
Significant Other follows a young couple Ruth (Maika Monroe) and Harry (Jake Lacy) who take a remote backpacking trip through the Pacific Northwest, but things take a dark turn when they realize they may not be alone. You can check the trailer below.
And now, time for the review!
The Fight Against Our Fears
It’s hard to make a scary movie. Not only do you have to have a good story on your hands, but you have to create real tension and terror in the viewer. The objective is for the viewer to be scared, not to laugh, so the special effects must accompany the tension of the story, accumulating it, until creating a terror that gets into the bones of the viewers.
Significant Other manages to do it in a simple but effective way. It’s one of the few horror films in which we don’t see the monster’s true face… because the monster is us.
The monster in this story has the face of the people we love or even ours. And he reminds Ruth, the leader of the story, of her worst mistakes and fears, throwing all her regrets in her face until she reaches the limit. At that moment, she only has two options left: let herself die or fight to live. And Ruth chooses life.
Significant Other is an allegory of overcoming our fears by facing our inner demons. All seasoned with a couple of plot twists that will leave you with the wig on Mars. Without giving away too much, we’ll just say that Ruth may not be the typical sweet lead. She will give you more than a few surprises in this story.
The film borrows some of the key resources of the horror genre, recognizable to all, although it always tries to twist them to make a difference. And it’s clear that the movie succeeds in one thing: the leading lady fights to save herself.
We won’t reveal the end of Ruth or Significant Other, but horror movies often show how the protagonists need each other to survive. Especially in the case of female leaders. But this film is quite different in that respect.
The Past is Key
As a negative point, Significant Other lays the groundwork to develop some emotional problems from Ruth’s past but doesn’t finish doing so. That is to say, those problems are there and are mentioned throughout the film, but the movie goes too far over them and they remain in just a couple of arguments between Ruth and Harry.
Significant Other should have taken the opportunity to focus the psychological aspect of the story much more on Ruth’s past. In this way, we would have had answers to the questions that are raised throughout the story about Ruth’s past and this would have rounded out the story.
But don’t focus on what could have been. Significant Other is a very enjoyable horror movie that will make you have a good time full of tension and scares you at the most terrifying time of the year. So the film accomplishes its goal.
Significant Other is available to stream on Paramount+.
