"You'll soon find out there are times when this house is not exactly an ideal home."

Rating: 8/10 (18 April 2018)

For me, the best horror films are the ones that don't come at you and hit you in the face with ghosts, monsters, or spurting blood the way a lot of modern pictures do. I think allowing the momentum to build with ambiguous characters while implying that something mysterious is going on is much better at providing tension and suspense. You had a lot of that going on here with the character of Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) and her two young children, residing in a large, creepy house on the Jersey Channel Islands. The story takes place in 1945, roughly coinciding with the end of World War II, thereby adding another element of mystery to the story, that being the absence of Mrs. Stewart's husband (Christopher Eccleston), who's a potential casualty of the war.
Nicole Kidman was well cast for her role here, demonstrating a wide range of emotions as she perseveres to keep her children safe in the face of a daunting medical condition. A better one might have been that of the young boy portraying her son Nicholas (James Bentley). I mean, the kid looked really creepy throughout the story, even more so than older sister Anne, played by Alakina Mann, who provided more of a conflicted sibling in light of her mother's doubts about her observations in the house. The three caretakers who arrive at the Stewart home bring even more ambiguity to the story, as they have a past with prior inhabitants of the house.
I didn't realize I had seen this film when it first came out but as the story progressed I started to recall aspects of it without fully remembering how it turned out. So then the wheels started turning to try and figure out the twist ending, and it still managed to arrive at a satisfyingly surprise conclusion, along the lines of Bruce Willis's "The Sixth Sense". If I had been making the picture I wouldn't have had Nicole Kidman's character go into that long winded monologue after the reveal though. The twist by itself was enough to make the picture a memorable one.