"They're here" ... and so are they ...

Rating: 9/10 (26 February 2012)

In a nutshell, Alejandro Amenabar's "The Others" is a gripping and emotionally powerful horror film, respecting our intelligence enough not to overuse graphic elements and to make the perfect dosage between thrills and mystery. And the mystery surrounding the characters is so absorbing that it immediately plunges us into such an unnerving and harrowing atmosphere that at the end of the film, whether we found relief or our hearts were still pounding, we know we'd just have lived an extraordinary experience.
"The Others" is set in a large mansion inhabited by a young mother, Nicole Kidman as Grace Stewart and her two children, Anne and Nicholas. The film opens when she receives three applicants for house jobs, an elderly tacit grounds-keeper named Mr Turkle, a deaf and dumb adolescent, and the lady who seems to lead the group, Bertha Mills, played, in a remarkable performance, by Fionula Fllanigan. Mrs Mills is the kind of character that immediately strikes the viewer as very competent in her job while the eventuality of her vileness is better conveyed by the peculiarity of her workmates. what's more, Mrs Mills' personality, very calm and professional, efficiently contrasts with Grace's more natural behavior as a loving and caring mother, trying to hide her excitability behind a mask of aristocratic-like composure.
It's hard to figure the period of the film until Grace mentions that her husband is fighting in Europe: it's WWII, the film is set in a mysterious foggy island in Britain, and we ought to believe her. Now, why would the mother of two kids endure such a spooky location? the answer is immediately given, setting at the same time, the tone of the film. Her two kids suffer an extremely rare syndrome, they are photosensitive, which means they can't be exposed to sunlight without being victims of irremediable symptoms. Therefore the mansion's activity is driven by a special but indispensable routine implying to close all the doors with a key, whenever someone gets in or out. This information is vital, and plays as an interesting display of smart writing in the way it distracts us from many precocious interrogations, such as why are all the three servants dressed in a very old-fashion way.
I mentioned in the early paragraph the atmosphere of the film and, no pun intended, it's indeed the key element that drives the film. The atmosphere is so intense that we don't need to be scared, because we constantly keep our guard up, it's the kind of situations so calm we know something will happen. Yet everything remains desperately quiet, and as the movie progresses, all we have are little doses of thrills, through apparitions, voices, screams, encounters with mysterious presences, and the macabre discovery of photographs showing dead people, but no death, no gore, no fights. The secret of "The Others" is to works as an efficient set-up whose sensational impact would ineivtably rely on the climax, so all we have to do is to be patient, and collect all the hints in order to know what to expect and this is what communicates the thrilling effect of the film
The atmosphere is carried by a shadowy external photography and a powerful cinematography whose use of lights transforms the vastness of a mansion into a sum of little closed places, conveying the disturbing feeling of a suffocating paranoia. The house is so big yet feels so small while the mysterious and haunting presence of 'strangers' make the whole setting totally unsettling. And the force of the film is within the story as it features characters who are apparently forced to live in this mansion for vital reasons, and the satisfying resolution would either be a way to chase the others, or to be chased, but we all know the confrontation is inevitable. "The Others"' suspense works on a Hitchcockian level, even more effective because we really don't know what to expect, and take it from someone who saw it each time with different persons, no one ever guesses the ending, and neither did I.
But it would be unfair and untrue to imply that "The Others" only works thanks to the ending, the narrative evolves around an emotional core within the story of a mother who tries to protect her two children. And the conflict in "The Others" is not just between two different kinds of presences in a same house, but the psychological consequence through the torment invading the heart of a woman, torn between her maternal instinct and a terrible secret belonging to the past and profoundly affecting the present. Nicole Kidman magnificently embodies the vulnerability of a woman left alone and totally alienated by too much responsibility. And Mrs Mills represents the perfect counterpart to Grace's hellish condition and while she gets closer to Anne, and Grace's behavior becomes more suspicious, the notion of vileness goes back and forth and we wait until the moment it will finally determine who the real antagonist is Â… if there ever is one.
All in all, it's hard to know who is the straight person of this series of incidents when emotions are so powerfully engaged. "The Others" is a remarkable chronicle of a dramatic family story involving a woman and two kids, one strong-minded and free-spirited little girl and her poignantly coward little brother. The two kids, beautifully portrayed, mirror the same contrasts between Mrs Mills and Grace Stewart and what's more, their condition plays like the metaphor of Grace's symbolic sensitivity to an even blinding and painful light. Needless to say that the ending doesn't disappoint and elevates the films to one of the greatest horror mystery thrillers of the last 20 years, working in every single level.
So beware of the light, whether it's of a blinding sunshine or a terrible secret