Promises more than it delivers

Rating: 5/10 (26 November 2001)

This is director Alejandro Amenábar's first feature film in English,
having previously worked in Spanish, and certainly the film does
have a European quality to it, making a welcome change from the
recent crop of Hollywood thrillers such as What Lies Beneath and
Unbreakable. However, this is not to say that The Others is an
outright success. Nicole Kidman deserves credit for taking a
chance on a relatively unknown director, but despite when of her
best performances to date, her character is too neurotic and her
religious fervour which she inflicts upon the children, prevents her
from gaining our full sympathy.
However, the main reason that The Others disappoints is that it
simply isn't scary enough. The children lack any kind of creepy or
eerie qualities, so we never believe they are malicious, which
would have added an extra dimension to the suspense.
Likewise, the servants are too homely to ever really be scary and in
particular for a British audience, Eric Sykes as the gardener is
never going to be spooky. The children's allergy to light was
intended to subvert the horror convention of dark bringing fear and
light bringing salvation. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work and
instead just seems like a convenient device to allow most of the
film's action to take place in the dark.
Nazi occupation of Jersey is mentioned, but doesn't form a major
part of the plot, which is certainly a missed opportunity to explore
more interesting themes than the straightforward supernatural line
the film chooses to follow.