The Others (2001)

Official trailer

The Others is Alejandro Amenabar’s 2001 Spanish-American gothic horror film. The film depicts Grace Stewart living with her two photosensitive children Anne and Nicholas in a remote British Isle of Jersey mansion in 1945. The children can’t be exposed to direct sunlight without suffering severe reactions. The household begins experiencing strange occurrences that Grace believes are supernatural intrusions. Three new servants arrive offering domestic help. Grace’s husband Charles, missing since the war, returns briefly and then leaves again. Nicole Kidman plays Grace. Christopher Eccleston plays Charles.

Fionnula Flanagan plays head servant Mrs. Mills. Alakina Mann plays Anne. James Bentley plays Nicholas. Eric Sykes plays gardener Mr. Tuttle. Elaine Cassidy plays mute servant Lydia. Amenabar wrote the screenplay. Sogecine, Cruise/Wagner Productions, and Las Producciones del Escorpión produced the film on a budget of approximately 17 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 210 million dollars worldwide.

The film is the principal early-2000s gothic horror revival production and showed that the genre could function commercially at major-studio scale. The work followed Amenabar’s earlier Open Your Eyes (1997) and consolidated his international reputation. Kidman gave one of her career-defining performances in the same year she made Moulin Rouge!. The Others won eight Goya Awards including Best Film and Best Director. The film’s structural twist has aged into one of the classic revelations in modern horror, though knowledge of the twist doesn’t damage later viewings.

The visual restraint, the atmospheric construction, and the period setting all support the gothic tone this film aimed for. Very few haunted-house films get under my skin the way this one does, and it manages it without shouting. It trusts a dark corridor and a closed door, and Kidman’s clipped panic does the rest. I’d rate it higher if the middle didn’t drift, especially the stretch with Charles, which feels like a detour on the way to the ending.

Kidman as Grace

Kidman plays Grace as a woman whose Catholic faith and maternal protectiveness have hardened into rigidity.

She covers every window in the house with heavy curtains. She locks doors behind her children. She insists on rules that border on cruelty. The performance balances the character’s real love for her children with her destructive insistence on control. The audience sympathizes with Grace while also recognizing she’s damaging her children.

Kidman shot The Others in the same production year as Moulin Rouge!, and the two performances couldn’t be more different.

Moulin Rouge demanded musical theater extravagance. The Others required restrained gothic interiority. Delivering both in one calendar year established her as a major actress with wide range, and I think Grace is the better of the two. She was nominated for Best Actress at the BAFTAs for The Others while also being nominated at the Academy Awards for Moulin Rouge!.

The Religious Element

Grace homeschools her children using a heavily Catholic curriculum.

The film depicts her teaching them about the four levels of Hell and the importance of accepting Christ as their savior. The religious content isn’t satirical. Amenabar treats Grace’s faith as the central element of her identity instead of a target for criticism. The work differentiates The Others from much contemporary gothic horror that treats religion as either supernatural source or thematic enemy.

Grace’s faith determines how she interprets the strange occurrences.

She believes she may be experiencing demonic intrusion. She prays. She tries to baptize her children again. The religious framing is what the character has available to make sense of her situation. Later revelations require the audience to reconsider every religious moment from the new perspective the ending provides. The Catholic content drives the film’s theme instead of functioning as period decoration.

I admire the film for taking Grace’s faith seriously. Her lessons about Hell frighten me as much as anything the house does, because she believes every word and her children have no way out of that classroom.

The Twist

The film reveals in its final twenty minutes that Grace and the children are themselves ghosts. They died together when Grace smothered the children and shot herself during a moment of postpartum or war-induced psychotic break.

The strangers occupying the house are living people who have moved in. The servants are also ghosts who knew the truth all along and were trying to help Grace recognize what had happened.

The revelation reframes every preceding scene. Grace’s strict rules about light suddenly make sense as the photosensitive children being ghosts instead of children with rare medical conditions. The locked doors and obscured windows take on new meaning. The film handles the reveal carefully so that the rewatch produces consistent instead of contradictory readings. The twist works on first viewing through surprise and on later viewings through recognition.

The reveal floors me. I’d call it the cleanest twist of its decade, because nothing before it cheats, and the servants’ patience with Grace turns from creepy to heartbreaking the second you see what they’ve been waiting for.

Is The Others worth watching?

The Others gets its 8 for Kidman’s rigid, frightened Grace and a twist that plays fair with every scene before it.

The religious material gives it a weight most ghost stories never try for, and the house scares me with nothing but curtains and locked doors. It loses points for a middle that drifts, especially Charles’s brief return, which never pays off the way the rest of the film does. I’d take it over almost any haunted-house film of the last twenty-five years.

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