What happens when the cork's in too tight

Rating: Null/10 (31 May 2002)

The Others is not a typical horror flick. Instead of scaring us with the dark deeds of Lucifer and his minions, as is typical, it takes us into the personal hell of a devout believer, who has managed to create her own damnation out of the very fabric of her religion and faith. And it's so effective because we've all known people like that. Some of us can identify with her, having lived life in a similar religious hell. It's a gripping story about someone who thinks of her supreme being as an angry, vindictive old bastard. She creates her personal reality out of this fundamental, unexamined assumption. The main character's name, Grace, is a beautiful irony: she has no grace with herself, or others, which is, ostensibly, the essence of her faith.
Adroitly played by Nicole Kidman, Grace is a woman oppressed by religiously induced fantasies about what should and shouldn't be, to the extent that, when it isn't so, which is most of the time, her pious aspect shows its righteous and terrible wrath. She's a `pocket' angry deity, a miniature Jesus of the book of Revelation, p***ed off, with a sword and a big white horse and eyes blazing and just itching to raise whoop-jamboreehoo against the ungodly. Though a clever woman, her mental abilities lie dormant on the fallow ground of `thou shalts' and `thou shalt nots,' which she uncritically absorbs from her blessed catechisms. Not only does she torment herself with externally derived notions of personal perfection, but she persecutes everyone else with her anally conscientious moral rectitude. If she showed up at your office cocktail party, you'd probably find yourself on the opposite side of the room. She just has the cork in way too tight.
We ask ourselves throughout the film, `What's with this obsession?' And then we find out with the movie's surprise ending, which, I confess, caught me like a good left hook. Wham. Right on the chin. It's a very clever variation on an old theme.