Brilliant chiller

Rating: 9/10 (13 August 2006)

"The Others" is a phenomenal ghost story brilliantly told by master filmmaker Alejandro AmenÃ¡bar, who, since winning an Oscar for "The Sea Inside" a few years back, seems to have vanished into a ghostly netherworld.
Nicole Kidman, in what I consider her only enjoyable performance, plays Grace, a mentally frayed young mother driven to the edge of hysteria by her singularly impossible situation. It is the late 1940s on the isle of Jersey, one of the few regions of England to suffer under Nazi occupation during the war. Her husband, who went away to fight, has not returned, and she's been told to give him up for dead. She finds herself in lone charge of her vast, dusty old manor after the help suddenly disappear without warning. This is doubly difficult because her two children are photoallergic; they cannot tolerate any light brighter than that of a candle, or they blister, seize up and eventually die. No curtains can be left undrawn; no doors can be left open. The children's universe is a house-sized black cocoon. This has meant that Grace has spent most of her life alone; bringing them up in what she herself describes as a "prison of darkness." Not surprisingly, she suffers from migraines and cannot stand even the slightest sound.
With this ingenious setup, Amenabar creates an ideal horror atmosphere: an old house lit only by candles, kept in a state of near silence. It also allows him to orchestrate a series of situations governed by one of the all-time great suspense concepts: "Whatever you do... don't do that!" Usually in a horror film the darkness is to be feared; in this case it is sanctuary. It is the light, advancing like a predator, that is to be fled.
The children, brilliantly played by remarkable young actors, are left pale and ghostly by their lifetime of confinement. Their perpetual isolation has left them sullen, resentful and lonely, and the daughter in particular is beginning to rebel. Grace, realising that her control over them is slipping, literally puts the fear of God into them through her strict religious instruction. But the daughter has read her Bible, and can give as good as she gets.
If Amenabar had merely played this scenario as was, without a supernatural element, it still could have evolved into a superior Gothic domestic drama. But he's too in love with the fantastic to leave Grace's world unturned. At the film's beginning, a trio of housekeepers straight out of Emily Bronte show up her door, claiming to be answering an ad for help they could not have known about. Suspicious but desperate, Grace agrees to take them in. It becomes increasingly obvious that they have a hidden agenda, though what that agenda is is unclear. For a time, things go well. And then the Others arrive.
The children notice them first; the son claims to have spoken to them. They laugh invisibly in the halls, play the piano when the doors are locked, and, most disturbingly, draw the curtains and unlock the doors, leading Grace to conclude they are engaged in a war against her and her children. Under siege from a force she cannot locate, Grace begins to step over the edge she'd been skirting for years, and fall finally into madness.
This is an intricate tale, brilliantly constructed. Not a single scene or line of dialogue is wasted. Indeed, from a simple storytelling angle I would say it is superior to "The Sixth Sense," to which it shares many similarities, including a shocking, brilliant twist ending. However, although there are moments of pure terror and an overarching theme of dread and despair in this story, "The Others" isn't quite as scary as Shyamalan's masterpiece, mainly because Amenabar perpetually pulls the rug out from under the audience's expectations, so that the Others, unlike the Dead People stalking poor benighted Cole Sear, remain a complete mystery until the film's conclusion. Are they ghosts? Human intruders? Some plot by the new "help" to drive Grace mad? Or simply all in Grace's increasingly distracted mind? As such it is often difficult to know whether one is supposed to be frightened or not, and for the most part this film takes on the air of an old-fashioned Gothic mystery, rather than a horror film. But when the plot finally unfolds completely, nearly taking Grace's sanity with it, the audience is treated to a sustained climax of genuine fear that leads to a mind-bending conclusion.