Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/The Others

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

Comment
on this review

Goose Bumps

Feel the fear in The Others

by Chris Neal

The fog is as thick as molasses, there's no electricity, and dark is coming to an enormous, isolated Victorian mansion holding a small group of troubled people like a prison. This can only mean one thing: some gnarly shit is about to go down.

And go down it does in The Others, although with a slow, deliberate pace, emotional complexity and lack of bloodshed that will befuddle viewers weaned on slasher flicks. Grace (Nicole Kidman) is struggling to keep the home fires burning as she waits to learn the fate of her husband, who has yet to return from World War II over a year after the conflict has ended. As the film opens, she is hiring new housekeepers (Fionnula Flanagan, Elaine Cassidy and Eric Sykes) to replace the previous staff, who left suddenly and mysteriously in the middle of the night.

The new help soon learns that this is no ordinary gig: Grace explains that her two young children, Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), have a rare condition which makes direct sunlight lethal for them, so the curtains must always be closed, and each of the cavernous home's 50 doors must be locked before another is opened (the idea of the children's photosensitivity makes this the rare movie in which daylight equals danger, rather than salvation). The setup is so obviously jerry-rigged for terror it almost dares you to chuckle: all that darkness, all those doors with who-knows-what waiting behind them...

Before long, little Anne is seeing and talking to people who may or may not be there ("the intruders," as they're called, despite the movie's title), which is all a bit too much for Grace, a devoted Catholic already so tightly wound that her springs are starting to snap. Inevitably, though, it soon enough becomes clear that there's more at work here than a girl's imagination.

The Others is writer-director Alejandro Amen�bar's American feature debut (his native Spain doubles for the British isle of Jersey here), and he turns the screws with great skill and delicacy. There are only a few genuine boo!-type scares to speak of, but the ominous atmosphere coils more and more tightly right up until the film's stunning climax, which—well, let's just say I haven't had goosebumps all the way down to my feet in years.

Amen�bar (who also composed the letter-perfect score, and is smart enough not to overuse it) constantly courts danger by playing off hoary spookhouse clichés, so his cast's ability to sell the material is key. Here, he's in luck. Kidman communicates the stresses which have been eating at Grace—the isolation, the demands of her children, her gnawing doubt about whether her husband will return—without ever going overboard. All the cast, in fact, underplay the material, lending it the gravity it needs to cast its spell. Only Flanagan, as the new nanny who knows more than she's letting on, seems to wink at the stock aspects of her character. If The Others occasionally recalls Rebecca (and the 1963 Haunting and Turn of the Screw and...), then Flanagan's Mrs. Mills is its Mrs. Danvers.

But the real find here is Alakina Mann, the young newcomer who plays Anne. She can go from adorable to cheeky to I-see-dead-people creepy in the blink of an eye, and her know-it-all domination of little brother Nicholas (James Bentley—another terrific newcomer, albeit in a smaller, simpler role) offers the film's few lighthearted moments. When Anne vehemently insists to her mother she is seeing ghosts despite Grace's angry disbelief, Mann shows not a trace of typical child-actor shrillness; on the contrary, she plays Anne's defiant honesty so well that we get our first real clue that something supernatural really is going on in the house. The children's roles are both crucial, because it's the relationship between Grace and her kids that gives the movie its psychological juice. For example, Anne does more than bicker with her mother—she seems to really mistrust her, and the mystery of why that might be only ratchets up the tension.

And it in this area that Amen�bar really shines. In a day when horror-movie auteurs are usually more concerned with coming up with cool CGI shots (nary a one here, as far as I can see) than with plumbing a story's psychological depth, Amen�bar isn't afraid to gets his hands dirty in the serious business of human interrelationships.

That's what makes The Others so powerful—because it isn't really about being afraid of ghosts at all. It's about the fear of parental abandonment and betrayal, and the fear that everything you believe in is all terribly, sickeningly, even tragically wrong. It knows what all the best works of horror know: that what we're most afraid of is each other, and ourselves.