Movies I Didn’t Finish: Significant Other

Recently while browsing the Paramount+ selection, I stumbled on a movie called Significant Other, an exclusive-to-the-platform horror movie about a couple getting menaced by something in the woods. “Sounds neat!” I said to myself, and started watching.

Little did I know that what awaited me would be one of the most singularly memorable horror film experiences I’ve ever had. Not, I hasten to add, in a good way.

Our hapless protagonists are Ruth and Henry, a long-term couple whose relationship is picture-perfect apart from Ruth’s extreme anxiety. Henry has invited Ruth out on a multi-day backpacking trip in a remote forest, ostensibly in order to help her get over her fear of the wilderness but actually to help her get over her fear of marrying him. The proposal does not go well—in fact it causes Ruth to have a panic attack—and the next day the couple find their relationship strained to the breaking point.

Also, they’re being stalked by a shape-shifting alien, which I understand rarely helps relationship troubles.

For the sake of setting up how monumentally this movie trips over its own dick, I’m going to have to describe basically everything that happens up until halfway through, which is shortly before I stopped watching. Bear with me.

So it becomes apparent very early on that the alien is taking on the appearances of other lifeforms a la The Thing. In the opening scene we see it attack a dear with a distinctive broken horn, then Ruth sees the same deer staring at her spookily in the woods, then the next day she and Ruth find it dead with its head split open, covered in some sort of strange fungus-like growth. Obviously, the dead deer is the original and the spooky deer is the alien copy.

After the unsuccessful proposal, Henry goes off on a short walk by himself; when he comes back Ruth reconciles with him and they continue their journey. The next day, Ruth goes off to pee, finds a cave containing a mysterious blue liquid, and then is apparently attacked by something we don’t see. Cut to Henry, who finds her standing creepily in the woods. She acts strange and distant and is seen by the audience to be staring at him in a threatening manner when his back is turned.

Obviously, Ruth has been replaced by an alien imposter. The cinematography very much supports this conclusion: up to this point it had been taking a somewhat artsy tone, but from this point on things get downright trippy in places, signalling the dissolution of Ruth’s character and her transformation into something else. There’s some great tension inherent in the fact that we don’t know exactly how the alien operates, so we don’t know if the Ruth-alien is aware that it’s an imposter or if the copy of Ruth’s personality is struggling to maintain dominance over the alien’s mind. There is a sense that she’s highly unpredictable and could be a danger to Henry at any moment.

This suspicion is confirmed when she lures him to a cliffside and then throws him off to his death, before taking off into the forest and cracking her head against a rock. She’s found by an older couple and proceeds to act in a weird and unsettling manner, which just heightens the tension more.

Now, at this point I was pretty on board with Significant Other despite having had some early misgivings, like the over-reliance on fake-out jump scares. The movie had seemed to be setting up a scenario where Henry would be the alien imposter, even having ridiculously on-the-nose dialogue about him “becoming someone else”, so I was pleasantly surprised by the twist of Ruth becoming the villain. Very interesting. Let’s see where this goes.

Then Henry strolls into the clearing where Ruth and the older couple are camping, uses cheesy badly-rendered CGI alien powers to kill the couple, and explains to Ruth that he’s a scout for an alien invasion.

Oh no. It’s happening again. It’s horror villains who talk.

The double-reverse twist is that back in the cave Ruth found the body of the real Henry, who had been killed and then replaced by the alien on his post-friendzone walk. When she ran out of the cave and “Henry” approached her shortly afterwards, she somehow put together exactly what was going on and played along until she could figure out a plan to kill the alien and escape.

So first of all, that doesn’t make any sense. If I found one of my friends or family members dead in a cave and then shortly afterwards ran into them seemingly alive and well, I don’t think it would occur to me to assume that they had been replaced by some sort of shapeshifter. I would certainly not latch onto this idea with such certainty that I would then murder them without taking any steps first to confirm that my suspicion was true.

There’s just no believable way for Ruth to have put this together. I don’t buy it.

The other problem with the twist is that it only works because the movie cheats. Cutting away from Ruth before we see what happened to her in the cave is fine when it appears that this scene is the character’s death; once we learn what actually happened, it becomes apparent that the movie was just hiding information in order to make the twist work.

But okay, the twist is cheap and kind of silly and it kills the mood that alien-Henry talks and still has real-Henry’s personality, but I guess I can live with it. The movie squandered all that trippy cinematography on a predictable sci-fi thriller, but predictable sci-fi thrillers have their place. The situation is not unsalvageable.

Then the movie turns into a comedy.

To be clear, I don’t think the filmmakers intended for it to be a comedy, but I cannot see how anyone could watch the scene that follows and not view it as a comedy, so I must assume that at some point, someone realised that this Paramount+ exclusive horror movie had transformed into a comedy and was fine with that.  

So first of all, there’s a but where alien-Henry keeps trying to kill Ruth but is unable to due to Henry’s feelings for her surfacing. This is an inherently goofy idea, but it’s made worse by the fact that Henry’s actor plays the scene like a particularly hammy character in a Marvel movie.

Then, after he realises that he’s in love with Ruth, he chases her through the forest shouting “You don’t need to worry! I’m in love with you!”

I am fascinated by this scene. I’m fascinated by this movie, and I honestly don’t know how it flew so far under the radar because it’s rife for film critic dissection. Admittedly, the slower and moodier first half kind of disqualifies it as hate-watch material, but to me the fact that the movie actually seems good, or at least interesting, until it suddenly nosedives is all the more compelling.