(Writer’s note: In case you have yet to see The Others, it would be wise to do so before reading this review, which explicitly discusses details of its final revelation.)
The horror-movie twist turns on its head in writer/director Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, a movie that only recently seems to have gone through a revival of sorts, despite its box-office and critical success. The key here was the twist, in which our entire idea of the trajectory of the story is rewritten with the revelation of its characters’ relationship with death – and if this sounds a lot like the experience of watching another movie from around the turn of the century, involving ghosts and characters who do not realize they themselves are among the dead, it is hard to consider this film without one’s mind drifting to the other. Like M. Night Shyamalan in 1999’s The Sixth Sense, though, Amenábar seems to be asking a genuinely haunting question: in the face of such mortality, what remains but horror?
This is a scary film – not because of the presences detected in a grand manor house by a war widow, but because of the implications of its final revelation. It seems important to start there, at any rate, even though Amenábar’s screenplay builds toward it, because understanding the shocking truth about Grace (Nicole Kidman) and her children, Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), enhances the tragic nature of the story and audience perspective. As the climax arrives, we learn that this woman, her children, and even the servants (including housemaid Bertha, played by Fionnula Flanagan, and gardener Edmund, played by the late Eric Sykes) are all dead, and a mysterious old woman (the late Renée Asherson) and an elusive boy named Victor (Alexander Vince) are part of a séance.
Rather brilliantly, then, Amenábar has flipped the entire concept of the haunted house movie, so that the “hauntings” that seem to be occurring from our perspective are being performed by living people investigating the goings-on in their home. The horror tactics here are fully formed, such as how a communion dress hides a terrible vision of the right voice coming from the wrong face or how the pragmatically skeptical Grace hears footsteps coming from where they should not be. The puzzle pieces being put in place to build the central mystery are also complex and often startling: We learn that Grace believes her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) to have been killed during the Nazi occupation of France, but he returns under strange circumstances – and leaves shortly thereafter following a brief, distant stay.
Obviously, both are dead, and the ability for the dead to commune in this way, even after having been apart before whatever events led to their demise, raises all sorts of haunting questions about the nature of the afterlife. Amenábar and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe lay a thick atmosphere of dully orange oppression over every inch of this landscape, and the production, designed by Benjamin Fernández in collaboration with set decorators Emilio Ardura and Elli Griff, is monumentally effective at contributing to the mood of an utterly bereft family left to unthinkable devices following a war that suffered no fools and spared few from tragedy.
Kidman’s performance is one of the actress’ very best – a strong statement, to be sure – in that forbiddingly frail way of which only a performer of this caliber is capable, and the child actors, Mann and Bentley, are remarkably able to avoid precociousness altogether. The real story of the movie, though, is the atmosphere built up, before being subverted, by Amenábar through sheer skillfulness in tone and intention. Instead of those final revelations hitting the audience as silly or misguided, The Others proves itself to find an ultimate truth within this story of a family haunted by violence and tragedy, before ending on the only idea that could possibly make sense – that the afterlife is an unavoidable cycle.
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