‘The Others’

The thing about suspenseful movies with big surprise endings is that, once I’ve seen them, I don’t have a lot of motivation to watch them again. The Others, originally released in 2001, is one of those films. I watched it shortly after it came out on DVD, thought it was a pretty good movie, and it never occurred to me to watch it again.

Then it appeared on the syllabus for my horror genre readings class. It languished in its shipping box (unlike Ghostbusters, which my son immediately yanked out of the box and we watched that night). Blurbs on the cover of The Others promised, “Suspenseful!” “A Wicked Twist of an Ending!” but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. With my deadline looming, I still hadn’t motivated myself to sit down and watch the movie.

(As I write this, it occurs to me that I only have this problem with movies. If I like a book, I”ll read it over and over again, even though many of my favorite books are mysteries and suspense stories. Maybe it’s because movies are a more passive way to experience a story. I find it difficult to just sit on the couch for two hours staring at a screen without being heavily sedated.)

The assignment became a little more challenging when I realized the deadline was a week earlier than I’d thought, and I was going camping. So I ended up watching the movie on my son’s portable DVD player at our campsite one morning while my husband and son were fishing. It wasn’t so bad — once I moved inside the tent, the eerie atmosphere of the film exploded from that four-by-six-inch screen. Nicole Kidman’s opening scream into my earphones made me jump a foot off of my inflatable air mattress.

The biggest difference in viewing The Others for a second time around is that my perspective shifted, from empathizing with Grace as a young mother trying to protect her children, to viewing her as a sort of a crazy lady who is not getting what is happening around her. Either way, I found Nicole Kidman was stunning in her portrayal of Grace, for which she received several awards including a Golden Globe for Best Actress Drama and a BAFTA for Best Actress. It was a complicated role; she had to portray not only who Grace was but who Grace thought she was at the same time.

The film, directed by Alejandro Amanabar, is a great example of how to establish mood with a setting. An old mansion into which no light is allowed is the perfect setting for a ghost story. Unlike ghost stories in books, The Others has the opportunity to utilize a soundtrack, which is appropriately eerie, booming or silent at all the right moments. Fionnula Flanagan, as Bertha Mills, the housekeeper, is both motherly and mildly threatening, so that when I first saw the film, I wasn’t sure whether she was evil or not. Turns out, she wasn’t — she was just dealing with the crazy lady who didn’t get what was happening around her.

I loved the use of the mourning portraits in the story. You could use these in a book, but the movie takes full advantage of not only the inherent creepiness of photos of dead people but also that gut-punching moment when Grace finds the photo of the servants. 

The only part of the film that I’m still a bit confused about is the return of Grace’s husband. She finds him wandering in the fog, saying he’s been trying to find his home. He comes home, sleeps a lot, finds about what happened to the family, leaves. But before he does, Grace screams at him, “It wasn’t just the war. You wanted to leave me, didn’t you?” He responds by making love to her. Then he leaves. Bertha comments that maybe he didn’t know he was dead, but somehow, I found the husband’s part in the story to be a bit of a head-scratcher. Why did he make love to Grace if he was angry at her and planning to leave? Even if he didn’t know he was dead, he knew she and the children were dead, so how did he think he was interacting with them?

All in all, however, despite my unusual viewing circumstances, I found that The Others was so well written, directed and acted that I enjoyed it even though I knew the ending. Excellent camping film. I give it four marshmallows.