A superb ghost story

Rating: 9/10 (12 March 2002)

SERIOUS SPOILERS AHEAD. If you haven't seen the film don't read so much as a single word below. ...
As with "The Sixth Sense", I believe you're MEANT to guess halfway through. When Grace meets her husband it's a "Vertigo" gesture: we now know the central truth that's eluding the main characters, they don't, and the tension comes from us waiting for them to find out. Anyway, it's not as if the series of broad hints we are dropped during Grace's walk in the woods reveal ALL secrets, or clear up all mysteries. We weren't told at that point that the caretakers are also dead, or that Grace murdered her own children, although the film plays fair with us and tells us all we need to know to work these things out.
The list of clues I failed to see the significance of at once is an embarrassingly long one (although the chagrin was pleasant): the undelivered letter, the mysterious departure of the servants, the day that "mummy went mad", the fact that Lydia underwent some trauma that rendered her mute... But in addition to all these clues there's one EXTERNAL to the narrative, a matter of technique, which I failed to read correctly even though I saw it mentioned before I saw the film, and noted it while watching.
It was in a review by New York critic Godfrey Cheshire. It wasn't favourable. An essential component of the haunted-house story, Cheshire argues, is "daylight reality", which means that in order for the spookiness to work we MUST see the people who are about to be haunted doing ordinary things in broad, unthreatening daylight. And he's right: "daylight reality" IS an essential component of any story of this kind.
So when the film opens with Grace emerging from a nightmare, breathless with terror, in a dark house surrounded by fog, it DOES appear to be a stylistic defect. But it isn't. Grace, it will eventually turn out, is a ghost, a haunter rather than a hauntee. "Very well," I thought to myself when I discovered this, "but what about the caretakers? Why don't we see THEIR daylight reality?" The answer to this question is the same: because they, too, are ghosts (you think by this stage I'd have got it). Not until the very end, when we meet the "others", does the sun come out. This hard-won "daylight reality" is no less effective a part of the ghost story for coming last rather than first.