a plea for visceral enjoyment

Rating: 9/10 (11 November 2001)

Firstly, I'd just like to say I've read many of the other comments here, and I do not understand why some people feel the need to belittle the intelligence of those who enjoyed a film, when they themselves did not. Enjoyment of a film can be visceral - it gets you in the gut, your adrenaline rushes, or you may be overcome with waves of inexplicable dread or melancholy. This kind of enjoyment does not need to be intellectualised - it is felt or it isn't. Even a technically bad film can produce such affects in some members of its audience.
So your wife fell asleep in the film, and you were bored. Does this make you a superior being to the people who sank low in their seats, voraciously absorbing the gloomy atmosphere, and feeling our insides turn to ice water? I fell asleep once in Jean Luc Godard's 'Breathless' (however I've managed to stay awake during Tarkovsky films - no mean feat according to some). And yet that film is considered a masterpiece by many. It just didn't resonate with me.
Anyway, I think you can tell that I loved 'The Others'. It's haunted me all weekend. I saw some things coming but resisted the temptation to 'second guess' the plot, allowing the film to reveal itself to me in its own time. The children - let's not compare them to Haley Joel Osment for that kid is a freak of nature - were pinched faced and touching, reminding me of my relationship with my own malleable younger brother when we were that age, and I could make him believe anything (hehehehe).
In a time when most films with a supernatural bent rely on what is seen and what horrors can be made visible through special effects, it was refreshing to find a film which relied on what was hidden. It was more about sound than vision. I'll be seeing it again, hoping to recapture some of the delicious ambivalent dread of my first viewing.