Alexandre Franchi’s latest film L’AUTRE is a thriller that takes a darkly comedic aim at Quebec’s faltering health care system, while contemplating mortality and what it means to truly live.

Inspired by the director’s own experience with cancer, the story centres on an advertising writer and aspiring fantasy author Stan (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who finds himself losing his grip on reality while bedridden in the hospital. After having a cancerous section of his leg bone removed, a surgery which Franchi playfully shows in gory detail, Stan’s confidence in his own recovery begins to waver when he learns only 50% of patients survive the first five years after such a procedure. Furthermore, there is a chance his leg could be amputated if an infection occurs during the healing process.

As if that news wasn’t disheartening enough, the hospital’s incompetence at every level becomes too irksome to ignore. Doctors and nurses routinely assume he is another patient, barely look at his medical chart, and mess up his medication. Plus, the team in charge of his physiotherapy flings him around like a rag doll despite the immense pain he feels. To top it all off, he was supposed to be recovering in a private room but is assigned a roommate, a young Algerian man named Darius (Bilel Chegrani) who is in a coma after a public shooting, despite his objections.

Already frazzled by his circumstances, and with only his girlfriend Bénédicte (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and her sarcastic sister Fleur (Nahéma Ricci) reminding him of his life outside the sterile walls, Stan cannot help but reflect on his mother’s own tragic battle with cancer. As the medication causes the lines between fantasy and reality to blur, he begins to become increasingly paranoid that his new roommate is not only faking being in a coma, but also has gang ties that increasingly put the writer’s life in danger.

Similar to a child picking up momentum on a swing, L’AUTRE aims high but never fully touches the perfect blend of social commentary and thrills it reaches for. In its best moments, Franchi’s film reveals in a dark and silly humour, including a running gag that captures the intrusive nature of hospital etiquette for patients seeking a bit of bedpan privacy, that allows its critical medicine to go down easier. Couple this with plenty of quick edits and fantastical elements, and the audience vividly feels the sense of delirium in Stan’s off-kilter state.

Cardinal’s impressive performance also keeps Stan’s fears about death and lingering grief at the forefront, even when the film takes inventive leaps.

As entertaining as the film is, it lacks cohesiveness. This is especially evident when Franchi attempts to balance the trauma of the past with rocky waves of relationships in the present. While L’AUTRE repeatedly touches on the lingering fear and grief from losing his mother, Stan’s complicated bonds with Bénédicte and Fleur rarely get a moment to breathe. The viewer simply does not learn enough about either character to care about the triangle Stan finds himself in. This makes many emotional beats feel hollow, as they often clash with the film’s fantastical thriller elements.

The unevenness of the protagonist’s personal life also undercuts the tension around Stan’s roommate, who is often shown menacingly in silhouette behind a curtain. Easily the most fascinating aspect of the film, the turbulent bond between him and Darius feels stunted by frequent diversions into other underrealized aspects of the writer’s life.

In addition, the audience can’t miss that Stan directs the brunt of his indignation at minorities. The immigrant nurse is presented as far more incompetent than the buffoonish doctor Stan encounters, and Darius is instantly viewed as a potential threat. While Franchi clearly makes a point about his protagonist’s privilege and self-centeredness, Stan’s moment of self-awareness about his biases comes too late in the film and never feels like true growth.

L’AUTRE may use its surgical dissection of the health care system to reaffirm what it means to live, but its stitches unravel when it tries to keep its comedic and emotional beats tied together.

L’AUTRE premiered at TIFF 2026 on September 12 and has additional screenings on September 14.

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