Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others has a surprise in store, much like The Sixth Sense, which preceded it by two years. Amenabar’s supernatural thriller from 2001 also shares with The Sixth Sense a quality that makes it more than a ghost story: the ability to tug at the heartstrings even as it sends shivers down the spine.
The Others, which is available on Prime Video, is led by one of the few actresses who can effortlessly portray a sense of the uncanny. Nicole Kidman brilliantly uses her face and body to portray an emotionally fraught woman trying to shield her children – and herself – from malevolent forces. (On Sunday, Kidman won the Best Actress award for Babygirl at the Venice Film Festival, but could not attend the closing ceremony since her mother died on the same day.)
Although set in the mid-1940s, the movie’s themes, characters and overall stylistic treatment are classically nineteenth-century Gothic. The plot unfolds almost entirely in a sinister-looking mansion on the fog-encircled Jersey island.
Grace lives here with her daughter Anne (Alakina Mann) and son Nicholas (James Bentley). Grace’s husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) hasn’t returned yet from World War II. The children suffer from extreme photosensitivity, which means that the curtains in the house must be drawn at all times.
Into this enforced darkness enter the enigmatic housekeeper Bertha, her husband, and a mute young woman. Bertha (Fionnula Flanagan) humours her mistress’s peculiar demands, raising only the slightest eyebrow at Grace’s strict upbringing and obsession with not letting a speck of light into the house. When Anne claims that there are other people in the house, the deeply religious Grace is sceptical – but Bertha isn’t.
Astute viewers might soon guess who the “others” are, but that doesn’t spoil the viewing experience. Style and substance fuse completely in The Others.
The film’s treatment of the haunting that afflicts Anne and later Grace is matched by Javier Aguirresarobe’s richly atmospheric camerawork. Aguirresarobe creates magic out of low light conditions. Faces emerge out of pools of darkness. The thick curtains create a suffocating feeling that is enhanced by Grace’s constant fretting over her children’s behaviour and Bertha’s gnomic pronouncements.
When Grace learns the truth of who has been terrorising her family, The Others goes from a specific spooky ghost story to a horror that is universal in nature. Like M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Amenebar invites you into a supernatural world that opens out to reveal human fears.
Also start the week with these films:
‘Gharat Ganpati’ gets into the festive spirit
‘Kinds of Kindness’ is weirdly compelling
In ‘Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry’, a woman’s desire takes flight
