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· Year: 2001
· Also known as: The Darkness, Los Otros
· Director: Alejandro Amenábar
· Writer: Alejandro Amenábar
· Cast: Nicole Kidman, Fionnula Flanagan
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· The character of Mr. Tuttle is conceivably a reference to the handyman of The Changeling.
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| Synopsis |
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While a woman waits for the return of their husband from World War II, she and her children--both of whom suffer from a malady that requires they live in perpetual darkness--realize that their secluded mansion is haunted by terrifying forces.
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RATING
Out of 100 |
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85
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| COLD ANALYSIS |
| ATMOSPHERE |
| GORE |
| HUMOR |
| SCARES |
| TENSION |
It is hard to think of a recent movie more rooted in gothic horror tradition than The Others, an atmospheric and tense journey into suggested horror. As soon as the movie starts, we get a nice dose of classical Innocents-style acting from Nicole Kidman, a pitch-perfect tone she maintains through the entire movie. In fact, The Others owes a lot to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and its aforementioned finest cinematic adaptation, and bears a strong tonal similarity to The Woman in Black. The Others reveals not just an affinity for the conventions of gothic fiction but for "actual" hauntings as well; this story could be the basis for any one of the Castle Ghosts series of ghost documentaries. This is a film that is steeped in gothic atmosphere, proud of its paranoia, slow pace, and subtle intelligence. Maybe "intelligence" isn't quite the right word--"craftiness," taken in its most positive meaning, might be better. What in lesser films would seem to be convenient plot elements in The Others are fundamental. For one thing, the children's disease is a fantastic plot device. By making those two defenseless characters unable to withstand more light than that of a candle, impressive director Alejandro Amenábar has found a way to plunge the vast majority of the feature into darkness. It a new take on an old, old device, but Amenábar uses it to its fullest. The disease is also a lovely excuse to create rules that the characters have to follow (in function, if not in form, a la Gremlins) and a nice way to make the audience spend the entire movie worrying about them being broken. In a lesser movie, that wouldn't work, but because we genuinely care about the characters, we worry about the punishments they would receive, should they break the rules. Perhaps just as impressively, The Others achieves what few ghost movies have--it makes you just as afraid in the bright sunlight as you were in the dark. (Here, The Changeling comes to mind.)
Interestingly, though the film properly moves forward at a deliberately slow speed, its characters are not always permitted to progress in the same manner. Though the atmosphere inherent in classic gothic horror requires a slow pace, the progression of the haunting and the characters' reactions to it are not always organic. Nicole Kidman's progression from a sadly efficient mother to a frantic believer in the supernatural moved in fits and starts, a problem typified by the scene in which her daughter is told that although the mother hasn't directly experienced the haunting force, "she will." Well, fine, but why is that? We're never really shown any indication of why such an event would occur, just asked to believe that it will do so. My willingness, I suppose, only went so far.
I would, however, congratulate the filmmakers also on nicely executing an intriguing ending. It's unfortunate that I saw it coming for about an hour or more, but that's only because I had thought of the same thing as the basis for a short story years ago. My companions to the film--my wife and friend--were caught completely off-guard by it. Faults and all, The Others is an exodus into ghostly, gothic horror, a grandly cinematic vision of a home's haunted existence.
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