festival of rip-off

Rating: Null/10 (23 September 2002)

"The Others" can be considered the festival of quotations. There wouldn't even be the need to mention "The Sixth Sense", which Amenábar said he has seen when he had already achieved the script. From the plot reminding "The Haunting" by Robert Wise to the Victorian atmosphere which sends back to "The Innocents", the film Jack Clayton took from Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" in 1961; from the ambiguous mix of reality and reverie which prevents during large part of the film to distinguish the world of the living ones from the world of the dead ones, like in "The Other" by Robert Mulligan, recalled even in the title and that a few have noted, to the soundtrack, composed by Amenábar himself, full of echoes of the works included in "The Shining" (the "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta "of Béla Bartók and the quartet for strings by Krystof Penderecki), this film assume the shape of a glamourous, well crafted collection of quotations that a young unquestionably skilled director dedicated to (or stole from, it depends on your point of view) his favorite authors. Therefore we are dealing with the work of a director who probably doesn't have anything to say, but he says it very well. In that being very modern.