The Other Morgan
2021 · 14m · USA
Directed by Alison Rich
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tender
Morgan Yardley, a contented young exterminator, learns on her father's deathbed that there is another, seemingly more successful Morgan out in the world, and spirals into self-comparison as she questions the unremarkable life she has chosen.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The invisible rival is a genuinely perverse setup—a doppelgänger film where the doppelgänger is pure narrative pressure, never materialized, which sounds like a gimmick but becomes an ingenious inversion of how we actually torture ourselves with strangers' lives online.
Rich's restraint here is formally sophisticated: she builds psychological unease through absence and implication rather than spectacle, situating herself in a lineage of character-driven comedy that trusts the audience's discomfort with ordinariness as the source of genuine stakes.
The decision to keep the other Morgan invisible—to let her exist only as context, text messages, and the protagonist's spiraling assumptions—is the entire film, and it works because Alison Rich commits to that constraint so completely that comparison itself becomes the only character we need.
Reviews
A silly, ridiculous, and at times, dark story designed to remind us that feeling ok isn't about feeling better than anyone else.
For a comedy, The Other Morgan truly has an emotional narrative arc, with moments that effectively ground the story and make it relatable.
Festivals
- SXSW Film Festival 2021
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2021
- Seattle International Film Festival 2021
- Brooklyn Film Festival 2021