‘The Other Laurens’ Review: A Belgian Detective Drama That’s a Little Too Shaggy-Dog

Michael Nordine

27 August 2024 at 5:00 pm·3-min read

There’s no one with the first name Lauren in “The Other Laurens,” but there are twin brothers: François and Gabriel Laurens (Olivier Rabourdin), one of whom is dead. Claude Schmitz’s twisty neo-noir — the original French title, “L’Autre Laurens,” is pleasing to the ear in a way its English translation is not — is a thriller of identity, both in terms of how it’s mistaken and how it’s created. For the downtrodden private detective at its center, that entails disentangling his sense of self from that of his not-so-dearly departed twin — a more difficult task than figuring out what became of the deceased.

François perished in a car accident, which would appear to make his passing an open-and-shut case. But the first question in any detective drama is whether the accidental death that sets the narrative in motion was indeed an accident, and the answer is usually the same. “It’s like seeing him all over again,” François’ less-than-distraught widow (Kate Moran) says upon meeting twin Gabriel for the first time, “but out of focus.” The same might be said of the film itself, sometimes in a way that makes it hazily intriguing and sometimes in a way that just makes it hazy. At times “The Other Laurens” almost seems to be channeling the way “The Big Lebowski” and “Inherent Vice” play on noir conventions for laughs, the key difference being that this isn’t a comedy.

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That tonal mishmash can, at times, be compelling in its own right. Whereas in most movies of this nature the intrigue derives from the actual plot, here the real mystery is what exactly the film itself is going for. The vibes shift from one scene to the next, sometimes markedly so, and when “The Other Laurens” lets its mood and aesthetics carry the way it can be the right kind of offbeat. The more serious it gets, however, the less effective it becomes — especially in a dramatic monologue revealing an out-of-nowhere connection between what was surely the worst day of Gabriel’s life and, of all things, 9/11.

Much of the narrative complication stems not from Gabriel doing any actual detective work but from unsavory characters seeing him from afar and mistaking him for François, who didn’t exactly go to his grave with a clean record. He’s a reluctant participant in most of what happens to him, including going along with the case of mistaken identity in order to sniff out the truth. And while this kind of reticence is a common enough trait among ultimately engaging protagonists, Gabriel never really completes that arc. Whatever growth he undergoes feels like too little, too late, especially for the estranged niece who now has no one else to turn to (Louise Leroy).

But DP Florian Berutti’s photography really is something, giving “The Other Laurens” a distinct ‘70s vibe; awash in saturated colors and the welcoming glow of nighttime neon, these eye-catching visuals heighten the reality to something like a dream state. That’s particularly true whenever there’s a car onscreen: red reflections of headlights bounce around the frame like orbs suggesting an otherworldly presence the film itself can hardly contain.

If everything else in the film — or even anything else — were on the same level, this could have been an exemplar of the genre rather than an eyebrow-raising curio. Maybe the other Laurens would have been more interesting to watch for two hours.

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