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The Others
by Cole Smithey
The Others is the first authentic gothic horror film to come along since
Roman Polanski’s mind bending puzzle, The Tenant (1976). Set inside a fog
shrouded Victorian mansion on the island of Jersey (14 miles off the coast
of Normandy) during the last days of World War II, the movie sustains a
pitch of fear and suspense that tightens like a damp noose around the neck
of its audience. It’s a film that urges repeated viewing because of its
loving embrace of psychological terror inside the dark and lonely confines
of a mansion with some undesirable intruders. Nicole Kidman is brilliant
as Grace, an icy mother of two children who suffer from a disease that
prevents them from coming into contact with any light stronger than
candlelight. Things get wonderfully creepy when the three servants Grace
has hired to take care of the house become increasingly involved with
things that go bump in the dark. For anyone who thought The Sixth Sense
was clever and scary, writer/director Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others
makes that film’s winking conceits seem like an amateur hour.
Alejandro Amenabar has an ear for the chilling tones of children’s voices
when they recite prayers, and the confining ability of shadows to make one
a prisoner of space and mood. There isn’t a single bloody special effect
in The Others to give graphic release from the obsessive tone of the
story. The movie builds instead on the cumulative significance of Nicole
Kidman’s glacial darting stare and impeccably coifed hair while proof of
ghostly intruders is dreadfully revealed. Every element of costume, music,
lighting, camera angle, and dialogue meticulously supports the paranoia
that wells up in Grace’s devout Christian mentality. Grace cannot, and
will not, fathom an earthly world made by God where the living and the
dead brush against one another. Her self-deception is at once her strength
and her greatest weakness. The story is a mother’s supernatural journey in
which the unknown is revealed as frighteningly familiar.
The movie opens with a shout. Grace awakens from a nightmare, screaming a
blood-curdling shriek that casts a spell over the film that is not broken
even after the final credits have rolled. Grace is soon snapped into
reality by a knock at her front door by a trio of servants who promise to
be “honest and hardworking.” It seems that the previous servants abandoned
their jobs a few weeks prior without explanation or taking their final
pay. Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) is a disarmingly sympathetic Irish
cook and nanny who ushers Lydia (Elaine Cassidy - Felicia’s Journey), a
young mute servant and Mr. Tuttle (Eric Sykes), a jovial gardener, into
the command of Grace’s strict house rules.
Grace preaches to her new staff about the way each door in the 55-room
house must be locked at all times as she compensates for her children’s
photosensitive disorder by pulling every curtain closed in the house while
leading the house tour. Grace explains how the Nazis cut off power to the
house so often that she became accustomed to living without electricity
and gave up on restoring it. Silence, we learn, is of preeminent
importance to Grace.
When Grace introduces her unconventional children to Mrs. Mills from their
light protected bedroom it’s a jarring event because her definition of
motherhood seems so clearly skewed by a repressive agenda. Grace is a
tightly wound porcelain specimen of Victorian matronly values who
repeatedly punishes her children for confirming the existence of intruders
in the house. She home-schools nine year-old Anne (Alakina Mann) and
six-year-old Nicholas (James Bentley) with an iron resolve to give them a
sound foundation in ethics and religion by way of fear and discipline.
It’s revealed that Grace’s husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), has
gone to war and is not likely to return.
Anne is a particularly problematic child who constantly taunts Nicholas
with stories about a family of ghosts whom she sees moving about the
house. There are compound levels of implied accusations in the story
against Anne, Mrs. Mills, and the probable ghosts themselves that keeps
the audience in a state of suspended curiosity and anxiety. As the mystery
unfolds of whom or what is behind the strange sounds and occurrences
Amenabar spikes his dry cocktail of horror with moments of deft humor that
give the movie an enjoyable lilt of satisfaction.
By wrapping his story in a time warping mystery, Alejandro Amenabar
modulates the template for occult thrillers and presents a film built on
layers of half-glimpsed clues and ideas. As the audience is brought to
wrangle with doubt and suspicion through the eyes of little Anne and
Nicholas, the movie performs a perfect illusion of transposing
protagonists. If the numinous figures that haunt Grace’s grand mansion are
to be reconciled with, it naturally must transpire through the children.
But where madness finds favor in The Others is in the damning effect that
innocence plays. It’s a roller-coaster cinematic game that you will want
to play again and again.
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