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THE OTHERS
Rating: 
USA/Spain. 2001.
Director/Screenplay/Music – Alejandro Amenabar, Producers – Fernando Boraiva, Jose Luis Cuerda & Park Sunmin, Photography – Javier Aguirresarobe, Visual Effects Supervisor – Felix Berges, Production Design – Benjamin Fernandez. Production Company – Cruise-Wagner/Sogecine/Las Producciones del Escorpion.
Cast:
Nicole Kidman (Grace), Fionnula Flanagan (Bertha Mills), Alakina Mann (Anne), James Bentley (Nicholas), Christopher Eccleston (Charles), Eric Sykes (Edmund Tuttle), Elaine Cassidy (Lydia)
Plot: Jersey Island, 1945. Grace lives alone in a large, remote mansion while her husband is away fighting in the War. She takes on two new servants who are accompanied by a strange mute girl. Grace introduces the servants to her two children, Anne and Nicholas, who have an allergy to sunlight, and tells them how the rooms the children are in must be kept curtained at all times and that every time a door in the house is opened the preceding one must be closed. But Grace becomes troubled at Anne’s increasing belief that there are invisible people in the house. While she tries to make Anne deny the existence of ‘the others’, increasing evidence starts to convince her that there is something there too.
The Others is a ghost story that came out riding on the big Hollywood return of supernatural films that came in 1999. The Others was executive produced by Tom Cruise as a vehicle for (former) wife Nicole Kidman. (Presumably the film was completed before the high-profile Cruise-Kidman divorce which, with apt timing, wrapped up in court the week The Others was released). The Others comes from Chilean-born, Spanish-based director Alejandro Amenabar, who previously obtained attention in the West with the striking Virtual Reality film Open Your Eyes (1997). (Alejandro Amenabar and Tom Cruise probably met during the making of Vanilla Sky (2001), the English-language remake of Open Your Eyes that Cruise appeared several months later in the same year).
The Others is an old-fashioned type ghost story. It uses a full flight of the genre’s tropes – the large, gloomy old English mansion setting, the sinister retainers, hidden secrets from the past, mysterious noises and happenings, and, an effect borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), a pathological over-sensitivity to light and noise. Like any good old-fashioned ghost story, Alejandro Amenabar takes his time in the buildup. There are no physical shocks almost right up to the end, rather it is the subtlety of doors and curtains opening when people’s backs are turned, noises in places they shouldn’t be. Amenabar does perhaps rely too much on the soundtrack (which he himself composed) to produce sudden jolts but the film is all the more notable for obtaining great tension out of minimal physicality and maximum atmosphere. (A lesson The Haunting remake (1999) could have learned). The audience I was with was enrapt and when Alejandro Amenabar did pull the jolts everybody screamed in the right places. The film has also been beautifully photographed, where all the colour has been washed out of the exteriors leaving only greys and greens to the point that every outdoor shot seems to be taking place in a mist-limned country garden on a winter’s morning.
That said, other than a good deal of old-fashioned atmospherics, The Others for most of its running time never pulls anything remarkable out of the hat. And Nicole Kidman probably isn’t the right person for the part. It’s not that she’s miscast, it’s just that the Australian accent jars and seems out of place in rural England, with the film never deigning to explain it away. The flattened-out vowels and the Australian tendency to raise the end of sentences just make her seem like a rather cross, novice schoolmarm where she should be coming across as a blinkered, overly protective mother. She nevertheless does an exceptional job of playing frightened and afraid.
If that’d been all there was to The Others, it’d rest merely as being quite good but not great. But what eventually does make the film is its twist ending – in fact it’s really a double twist ending. [SPOILER ALERT]. It’s almost exactly the same twist ending and grand reversal of audience expectations that The Sixth Sense (1999) also pulled. But Alejandro Amenabar quite ingeniously conducts this within the confines of the haunted house genre. Many people will slam The Others on these grounds and certainly as another Sixth Sense is almost certainly the way it must have been pitched to Hollywood execs. But in all fairness, the film never exploited this connection in its promotion – it was, for example, sold as a haunted house story, not as a Sixth Sense copy. Furthermore it’s a twist that really comes closer to the little-seen adaptation of James Herbert’s Haunted (1995) than it does to The Sixth Sense. And of course Alejandro Amenabar was doing the grand conceptual twist abouts of audience conception of story and characters with Open Your Eyes well before the world had ever heard of The Sixth Sense and M. Night Shyamalan. And even though it has been done before, it works just as effectively this time around and proved to be something that turned The Others into a big sleeper hit with audiences.
The Others was parodied in Scary Movie 3 (2003).
(Nominee for Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress (Nicole Kidman) and Best Supporting Actress (Fionulla Flanagan) at this site’s Best of 2001 Awards).
Cast:
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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