Rating: NR | Runtime: 117 minutes
Release Date: June 7th, 2023 (France) / August 23rd, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Arizona Distribution / Yellow Veil Pictures
Director(s): Claude Schmitz
Writer(s): Claude Schmitz & Kostia Testut

You’re a real sicko, aren’t you?

At one point during Claude Schmitz’s The Other Laurens (co-written by Kostia Testut), a police detective (Rodolphe Burger’s Alain) tells his partner that their current state of affairs is “like a bad movie.” You don’t think too much about those words at the time, but that meta commentary epitomizes the whole better than anything else on-screen. Not because the film is bad. It’s not. But because it’s so all over the place that you cannot help feeling as out of sorts as Burger’s character. This thing is supposed to be about a young woman (Louise Leroy’s Jade) begging her P.I. uncle (Olivier Rabourdin’s Gabriel) to find out who killed her father/his brother. It ends up becoming a lot more than that.

What’s so captivating about the project is that all the other stuff that gets added ultimately arrives from nowhere. Jade’s shady stepmother (Kate Moran’s Shelby) invites an old friend (Edwin Gaffney’s Marine Scott) sans context until the script demands we know it. Shelby and her late-husband François are seemingly wealthy and yet a local motorcycle club (led by Marc Barbé’s Valéry) are constantly present as though they own the large estate instead. Add the inept cops (Alain and Francis Soetens’s Francis) searching for a missing person to an entire other group of characters that we’re introduced to in the prologue before not seeing them again until the third act and it’s all a massive shell game towards an uncertain finish.

Because we’re asked to care about Gabriel and Jade for the first two-thirds of the runtime. She’s just lost her father. He’s just lost his mother (and brother, but he’s not at all concerned about him). Jade is desperate to have someone in her corner, knowing that François’s demise wasn’t as simple as the papers make it. Gabriel is empathetic enough to want to help her if only to reconnect because she reminds him of her mother, someone we sense he knew more than just as an in-law. So, we enjoy their odd couple pairing. We even start to wonder if there’s more than meets the eye courtesy of stalkers, threats, and obvious deceit. Eventually, however, plot firmly steals the wheel away from any and all character development.

This move makes us wonder what the point of investing in those two was in the first place. They inevitably become as expendable to the story as the rest so Schmitz can play within multiple genres while rapidly progressing through revelations that most filmmakers would linger upon for greater impact. They still have a major role in the overall tale, but there’s no need to be bothered with the details when their place is better suited for pulling us forward towards an entertaining if extremely streamlined, bow-tied conclusion. The film’s idiosyncrasies (like having English speakers and French speakers talk in native tongues without us fully knowing who understands what) become the real intrigue.

Do we stop caring about what might happen to Gabriel and Jade? No. We just stop worrying about guessing since the ride takes over. Our investment pivots from them to the convoluted machinations that finally start clicking into place for a wild climax leaving plenty more bodies covered in blood than souls left breathing. It’s much funnier than you might expect from the subject matter (and don’t believe it isn’t intentional either considering the weirdest random bit of dryly comic WTF energy arrives during the credits to ensure we know nothing was left to chance) and a lot darker as a result too. Because it was never about finding justice. It’s about using and abusing others for personal gain only to discover you get what you deserve in the end: nothing.

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Louise Leroy and Olivier Rabourdin in THE OTHER LAURENS; courtesy of Wrong Men and ChevalDeuxTrois.