THE OTHERS Written and Directed by Alejandro Amenabar With Nicole Kidman, Fionnula Flanagan De Vargas PG-13 100 min.
`The Others' is an old-fashioned ghost story that aims not to slash the jugular but to constrict the throat, designed not so much for screams as for raising the little hairs on the back of the neck. Writer/director Alejandro Amenabar (Abres los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) simmers his atmospheric broth with a slow, sure relish over a low heat, with help immeasurable from the rich, darkly textured visual flavors supplied by cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe. The terrors Amenabar treats us to are terrors of the mind, terrors of the soul, terrors of the unknown and unseen, terrors of darkness and repression, terrors of isolation, terrors of a religion designed to put the fear of God into little children.
There is very little that can be said about this movie without giving too much away. Not much happens for long stretches, but it builds its web strand by strand, and its pleasures are in the buildup of little discoveries. It is probably safe to reveal that this is a haunted house yarn set in the formerly Nazi-occupied Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, just after WWII. Nicole Kidman plays Grace, whose husband has gone off to war and never returned. She lives in an isolated mansion with her two young children, who are afflicted with a strange and terrible malady that makes it essential that they never be exposed to daylight. There is precious little daylight to be had in this dark-paneled mansion at best; it is perpetually shrouded in a dense fog, and even to go out for a walk beyond the great iron gate is to risk getting hopelessly and terrifyingly lost in the swirling, changing mists. Nevertheless, all the windows are swathed in thick drawn curtains, and as Grace moves from room to room she carries a heavy ring of keys with which she unlocks each door and locks it again behind her to insure against one being carelessly opened or left ajar to let in lethal daylight.
A trio of servants – a middle-aged housekeeper (Fionnula Flanagan), an old gardener (Eric Sykes) and a young maid (Elaine Cassidy) arrive on the doorstep on the cold, misty morning on which the story begins. They are quickly employed, and set to work to replace the previous staff, which has left without notice, and who's to blame them? Days pass, there are strange noises, strange happenings.
It is surely no coincidence that Amenabar has named his heroine Grace. With her post-war hairdo, her cool control and her exquisite patrician beauty, Nicole Kidman bears a startling resemblance to Grace Kelly. It's a nicely calculated touch, lending an instant Hitchcockian classicism (and an eerie reminder of her bizarre and shocking death) to the atmosphere of the film. Kidman delivers a skilled performance as a woman walking a shaky tightrope between self-control and neurosis. Her religious fanaticism as she home-schools her children with warnings of `The Children's Limbo' and eternal torment delivers some of the movie's most disturbing moments. There is something very fragile rattling beneath Grace's competent exterior, and something very wrong.
Fionnula Flanagan makes Mrs. Mills, the new housekeeper, a nurturing yet vaguely malevolent presence, a sort of dark-side Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. The children are excellent, both the frightened, trembling little Nicholas (James Bentley) and his almost preternaturally self-possessed older sister, Anne (Alakina Mann). Christopher Eccleston adds a haunting cameo.
There are holes in the story and gaps in its logic, and these can be mildly troublesome in the last third of the picture. But Amenabar recovers for an ending that falls squarely within the traditions of the ghost story genre, like a tale well told around the campfire.
And now, children, crawl into your tents and try to go to sleep.
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