“Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead.”
A quality horror movie makes you feel bad-good. The mounting dread threatening on-screen characters increases our anticipation of whatever frights may yet be in store for us, and this worry lets us get hit in the feels.
Conventional wisdom also teaches us that whatever is both conventional and wise is well-known and repeated. In horror movies the corollary is cliché-ridden thrills built on expected patterns, although we privately hope they will be adjusted to become something new. What makes us lose our grip at the movies is when a cliché-ridden thrill escapes whatever pattern we anticipated and arrives, instead, at something truly unconventional.
Enter The Others, the 2001 movie directed by Alejandro Amenábar, which is a Spanish production starring British Isles actors in support of one Australian star in an English-language genre film about a mysterious mansion. The set-up puts us at the end of World War II on the Channel Islands where a controlling mother, Grace (Nicole Kidman), looks after her two photosensitive children while her husband is away in the war, presumptively killed in it, although this news is withheld from the kids. One day a trio of servants arrive, requesting work at Grace’s house, where they were servants under an earlier owner, and Grace accepts them into her world, although their disruption amplifies the fact that Grace’s children keeping saying there is a ghost in the house.
It spoils nothing to explain that the kids are right. There really is a ghost in Grace’s house, and her unwillingness to accept this fact, to address the interloper, is one of the chief thrills of the movie. You see, Grace is all about surface presentation and discipline. She is a religious woman who believes the Lord God will provide His divine guidance, and she will not let anything bad befall her kids; after all, it is her final duty, without a husband, to protect her children in peacetime now that the war is over.
Which means The Others is a haunted house horror show of creaking sounds and misdirection. Because Grace’s kids are allergic to sunlight, their lives unwind in a pre-electric world of nighttime maneuvering by candle light. So, the big mansion looms in dark rooms that we can’t really see, and somewhere inside this structure rests an evil that creeps up on us until we get a truly solid twist ending to re-organize all of the preceding action.
Some viewers will claim to see the trick well off in the distance. While this kind of insight is possible, I don’t think it likely, so cleverly produced is this movie, written and directed by Amenábar to capably use sound as the chief means for setting up an original fright.
–April 30, 2019
