Enough with the "elegant," "atmospheric" chillers. More exploding zombie heads!

Rating: Null/10 (20 August 2001)

The reason Kubrick's THE SHINING is the one successful haunted-house movie of recent times is that Kubrick went at the yin through the yang. Shorn of Gothic effects, the movie situates Gothic horrors in the stark fluorescent lighting and stainproof rugs of a Radisson Hotel Luxury Suite. A beautiful woman deliquescing into a rotting hag is somehow all the more primally horrific under cold all-around white light. All the old-dark-house cliches Kubrick and his co-scenarist, Diane Johnson, swept off the table in THE SHINING have landed in the lap of this elegantly directed thriller. (Those Kubrickian crumbs piled up in abundance in the absurdly overpraised, and overpopular, SIXTH SENSE.)
Nicole Kidman is a single mom in a big creaky house in the moors. She has two kids who, she tells the eyebrow-raising new nanny, are "allergic to light." This has the convenient side effect of making most of the movie Caravaggio-dark; it also gives the director the opportunity to exercise his fluffing-sheets-over-the-windows and sudden-shock-of-daylight muscles. The kids have a dad who may or may not be alive, and may or may not be a soldier at the front. And soon enough, Mom, Junior and Sis' creepy, claustral little home-schooling world is interrupted by banging noises upstairs, clangor on the piano, and mysteriously self-unlocking doors...
Alejandro Amenabar, the writer-director-composer, swirls up a tasty, classy, early-Hammer-horror atmosphere--Hammer before the pandering to sex. The Catholic mania of the mom is very cleverly built into her possible madness, and Amenabar deftly juggles all the possible layers of irreality and illusion that may be taking place at any moment. He's also lucky to have Nicole Kidman as the mother: not yet really a great actress, she is a great star, and she brings to the role a quality surprisingly similar to that of Piper Laurie in CARRIE--a raging sex-mad succubus underneath the church-white linens. Unfortunately, the movie is a veritable encyclopedia of creaky-door cliches. (The only one missing is the jowly, friendly constable who stops by and notices that...something isn't right.) The ending, a little evocative of Lucio Fulci, is nicely joined, but also a little too evocative of another, recent popular horror movie. (This being Anti-Spoiler Central, I won't give it away, but...it shouldn't take too much imagination to figure out.)