Sluggish "Others" saves its best for last

Rating: 5/10 (11 November 2001)

An ambitious disappointment, "The Others" is one reason why I hardly take word-of-mouth from critics and viewers, positive and negative alike, into account when I go to the movies.
Directed by Alejandro Amenabar (and featuring an executive producer credit for Tom Cruise), this film's strong points include solid but unspectacular acting that is enhanced by the cinematography and production design that nicely enhance a foreboding, isolated English mansion and spacious surrounding grounds (which were all filmed on location in Spain), but it is overshadowed by its incredibly slow pace and thin, recycled plot (which unfortunately has led to inevitable conclusions to "The Sixth Sense"). It is backed up by a flimsy score that descends into silliness during tense moments, thus killing their effectiveness.
As she should, Nicole Kidman provides the film's best performance as Grace, who, despite the insistence of her young daughter (Alakina Mann), refuses to believe that there may be ghosts inhabiting her house, where she pines away every day while waiting for her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) to return home from the war.
She takes in three new servants - a codger (Eric Sykes), a mute (Elaine Cassidy), and a crone (Fionnula Flanagan, who, for some reason, reminded me of the maid portrayed by Hermione Baddeley in "Mary Poppins"), after her previous help mysteriously disappears, but there is a lot more to this strange trio than she could possibly imagine.
Mann and James Bentley, respectively, make their first big screen appearances as Anne and Nicholas, two youngsters who have a potentially fatal allergy to light - or who are "photosensitive," as Grace verbalizes it - which results in an exhausting routine to make sure every door and shutter in the house is always shut and every curtain always drawn. It's a subplot that doesn't have much of an impact on the film as a whole.
Despite "The Others" being hailed for its suspense factor, all the suspense is couched into the last thirty minutes. The early scenes in which Anne insists that there are indeed supernatural visitors lurking about (in particular a little boy named Victor), which lead to Grace's eventual inspection of her surroundings, have no punch at all - save for one sequence in which Grace discovers an old photo album - because it's too predictable and...well, boring. It's something we've all seen a million times before. The music repeatedly hams up the "scare that's not really there" schtick, which quickly became tiresome.
But there's no denying the impact of the ending, which saves "The Others" from becoming a total disaster and what makes the needle spin on the adrenalin meter. I can't speak for everyone, of course, nor will I reveal any details, but the unexpected swerve completely dispelled anything I had theorized.
One thing that this film should be commended for, despite its failure in the scare department, is the fact that it succeeds for the most part in presenting a ghost story that doesn't rely on intense special effects or blood and gore (in fact, there's not one drop of the red stuff to be seen anywhere), instead relying on good old fashioned storytelling.
While "The Others" didn't work for me - and don't knock me for not understanding the plot; I grasped it plenty, thank you - it definitely will do the trick for horror/suspense fans who are sick of the ineptitude of dreck like the "Scream" series and who yearn for the days of good ghost stories once shared around the campfire. 6/10