Boring, slow and overrated

Rating: 4/10 (17 May 2004)

Why this movie is rated so high on this site will remain one of the misteries of the Universe to me. The only reason I can think of is because of the people's obssession with the twists at the end. But even so, the ending of this movie is not that good either. But even if it was excellent, it still couldn't have been able to make up for the boring hour and twenty minutes before that.
Possible SPOILERS:
I would also have to make the comparison with "The Sixth Sense" which had very similar plot twist and story. But the difference is that "The sixth Sense " was still interesting and engrossing movie even though I knew the ending before i started watching it(a stupid newspaper review spoiled it for me). It had characters who were very well developed, smart dialogue, great acting, superb directing. All those those things were sorely missing in "The others". And for me, "The others" had a lot more plotholes. I figured out most of the famous twist about 15 minutes into the movie, although it took me much longer to guess the other part, and it still surprised me a little bit in some details. But really it's not that good and when you think more about it, doesn't really make sense. END SPOILERS
Leaving the twist aside, it should also be said that for supposedly horror movie this one wasn't scary at all for me. It had all the classic elements(the haunted house, ghosts, the constant fog, the suddenly booming music) but couldn't make it work. The mediocre camera work also didn't help. The only times I got scared a little bit was because of the sudden sound "explosion", which combined with the constant whispering in the dialogue created some scary, but in the most boring and non-creative way, moments. I don't like being scared by such cheap tricks, and it was more of a surprise than a real scare. The acting wasn't that good too. I love Nicole Kidman, she's a great actress which gave some stunning performances in "The hours", "Moulin Rouge" and "Dogville", but here she's far from her best, whispering and shouting all the time, looking too rigid and wooden and didn't gave me the impression of being really scared when she was supposed to be(you can hardly blame her for the last bit though, those "scary" scenes were pretty lame). The children were good, but nothing special. I must say that this film was moving extremely slowly, even though it's only an hour and a half long. Too many repetitive scenes, too much repetitive dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, this movie had one of the worst I have seen of late. One example of that is the fact how many times the characters said to each other "Stop breathing" or "Don't Breathe". Overall, a big disappointment for me. 4/10