Ruth comes with a lot of emotional baggage and a bottle full of panic-attack poppers. Harry wants to marry her anyway, because he is in love. However, after witnessing her parents’ chaos, Ruth is not sure she believes in marriage. She also worries about strange things she sees in the forest, like the deer with only one antler, who seems to be giving her the side-eye.
She is not wrong. Something weird and unearthly is definitely afoot. Unfortunately, Ruth and Harry get intimately enmeshed in the terror. Sadly, another camping couple also stumble into the sf-horror hybrid mess.
Regular genre viewers might guess what is coming, but Berk & Olsen execute it quite cleverly. They also benefit from casting Maika Monroe and Jake Lacy, two rising thesps, who really keep viewers off-balance, selling the premise convincingly. Indeed, Lacy is flat-out terrific during the third act, but it would be spoilery to explain how and why. Regardless, this is his best work yet, even better than his work in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and Apples Never Fall, which was also quite strong.
Although their names do not even appear in the opening credits, Dana Green and Matthew Yang King are also both very good as the other couple camping. There are some impressive-looking visual effects in Significant Other, but it is the sort of story that is far more reliant on its performances, especially that of Lacy.
They spring several inventive twists and grow the tension nicely, so it is a shame Significant Other was sort of lost in the streaming shuffle, instead of getting a theatrical life—especially since the ending cries out for a sequel we are unlikely to get. Recommended for fans of films in the Predator-esque science fiction-horror crossover tradition, Significant Other airs Thursday night (8/22) on AFN and streams on Paramount+.
