A Nicole Kidman's star vehicle directed by Spaniard Alejandro Amenábar, his third feature, THE OTHERS is a gothic ghost story that cunningly takes the cues from and hot on the heels of M. Night Shyamalan's THE SIXTH SENSE (1999), pulling the wool over audience's eyes by a false premise.
Year 1945, Grace Stewart (Kidman) resides in a country mansion on the Jersey Island alone with her two children Anne and Nicholas (Mann and Bentley, both excellent), who are suffering, according to her, from a rare disease that they become extremely photosensitive. One morning, a triad of servants arrive unheralded at the doorstep, Mrs. Mills (Flanagan), the gardener Mr. Tuttle (Sykes) and a mute girl Lydia (Cassidy), Grace hire them out of hand since the prior servants has apparently left en masse without any explanation, and Mrs. Mills later confess that they have been employed in the house years before. Amenábar diligently teases us something is dead wrong here.
What follows is a commonplace haunted house situation that keeps audience dangling about which sides should we take, Anne, who claims she can see “others” living in the house or Grace, the naysayer becomes more and more perturbed by her daughter's “imagination”, our seesawing stance soon reaches a consensus as it is Grace's sanity that is the most dubious. After being convinced (most aurally) that some preternatural, invisible beings are lurking in the house, she will soon deny everything, especially since her husband Charles (Eccleston ) miraculously returns after being declared dead in the war, but what remains is a shell of a man once was her husband (or is it?), and something macabre is hinted, but what could it be?
Then, the three servants, especially through Mr. Mills, we are instilled a tertiary viewpoint of what is wrong about the house, and ultimately, the real one. Obviously they have an arrière-pensée (although no mendacity can be attributed to Mr. Mills' careful wording, and Flanagan is superbly poised, chillingly unflappable in her deceitful mannerism between benevolence and malevolence, yet she never goes grotesque, which conforms to the film's felicity of maintaining a spine-tingling frisson without resorting to cheap shocks and jump scares, it is an outstanding atmospheric horror, thick fog and white bedsheets are ever so spooky), but what appears to be something insidious is only a bluff before the reveal, which, even for a second viewing (after an almost 20 year interval), still packs a punch for its spectacular switcheroo.
Pale as porcelain, Kidman is a pillar of strength that ethereally swirls from room to room, an obdurate, delusional Catholic who always teeters on the brink of ebullition, and magnificently holds the story together even if it is entirely pivots on a flimsy precondition (Mrs . Mills could let the cat out of the bag in one short sentence, that will be the end of the film!). By and large, THE OTHERS is as entrancing a Halloween treat as it is effective as a genre undertaking.
referential entries: Amenábar's THESIS (1996, 7.3/10); Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS (1961, 8.8/10); M. Night Shyamalan's THE SIXTH SENSE (1999, 8.3/10); JA Bayona's THE ORPHANAGE (2007, 8.2/10) ).
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