The Others (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Fernando Bovaira, José Luis Cuerda, and Sunmin Park; directed and written by Alejando Amenábar; cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe; edited by Nacho Ruiz Capillas; production design by Benjamín Fernández; music by Alejando Amenábar; starring Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes, Alakina Mann, James Bentley, Elaine Cassidy, and Renée Asherson. 4K UHD + Blu-ray, color, 104 min., 2001. A Criterion Collection release.

With its cantankerous old mansion, its shadows and fog, and above all its ghostly presences, Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 hit The Others is very much a horror movie. And it’s a horror movie of the old school, inspired by vintage classics—Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963)—that value nuance and restraint over the flamboyant shocks that have dominated the genre in recent decades. “More than a film of screams, it’s a film of whispers,” the writer-director accurately says in his audio commentary for The Criterion Collection’s new edition. Although the story begins with a scream and underscores its moods with ominous music, much of its menace emerges through evocative dialogue and body language; this is also a film of verbal “duels,” Amenábar says, citing pictures such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 All About Eve, where melodramatic “divas” duke it out with words. Nor does the screen erupt with lurid images or jangling colors, since virtually all the action transpires in an isolated house where sunlight is forbidden and heavy drapes are always drawn. The director aimed at “a strange beauty” commingling poetry and horror, and he reached that goal with remarkable success. To my mind this is far and away his best picture.

It’s also one of his most personal ventures, despite its many familiar ghost-story conventions. In childhood Amenábar had been “a fearful kid,” closely attached to his mother, chronically afraid of the dark, and steeped in religion during a decade of Roman Catholic schooling. A strong mother, a superstitious take on Christianity, and spirits lurking in the dark are all key ingredients in The Others, and when it reaches its climax in a chilling séance, Amenábar is recalling a spiritualist session he attended as a child while visiting Chile, where he lived until his parents emigrated to Spain in 1973, just days before Augusto Pinochet’s infamous coup. He now thinks the mildly uncanny happenings in that long-ago séance were products of suggestion, but they made a big impact on him at the time, as he says in a conversation with critic Pau Gómez on the Criterion disc. One of his career-long interests is the human capacity for belief, delusion, and self-deception, a major theme in such earlier films as Open Your Eyes (1997), about a man with an unstable sense of reality, and Regression (2015), about paranoia sparked by a supposedly satanic cult.

The strongest believer in The Others is Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman), a war widow living with her young children, Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1945. To keep the place up she hires an aged gardener, Edmund Tuttle (Eric Sykes), and to help with the kids she hires a slightly less-aged governess, Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), and the servant, Lydia (Elaine Cassidy), who has lost the ability to speak for a reason we don’t learn until the end. Grace tells the new employees about the special needs of her children, who are afflicted with xeroderma pigmentosum, a sensitivity to light so profound that the slightest exposure could kill them. The house has no electricity and hence no artificial lighting, but sunshine poses mortal danger, so every curtain must be fully drawn, and every door firmly closed. Hence the tenebrous atmosphere that looms over the home and the lives of these otherwise normal-seeming youngsters.

Two other things loom over them as well. One is the Catholicism that Grace never tires of teaching, complete with moralistic admonitions and fears of divine judgment. The other is a growing dread of mysterious happenings in the mansion, where strange noises and half-glimpsed movements become more and more upsetting until Grace finds herself groping through the shadows with a shotgun, as if mere firepower could prevail against what appear to be threats from the spirit realm. The bumps-in-the-night aspect of the movie is hardly original (searching the attic, Grace gets a very clichéd scare from backing into a mannequin), but Amenábar gives even these moments a fair degree of oomph. Added intensity comes from the limited cast of characters—the family, the servants, and Grace’s briefly seen husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), a victim of the recently concluded war—each of whom occupies a distinctive place with a unique set of emotional traits. After making the peripatetic Open Your Eyes, with its multiple locations and time-jumping plot, Amenábar wanted to swerve in the opposite direction, using a more concentrated set of ingredients. The result is compact, elegant, and classical.

Deciding that an English-speaking location would suit this story best, Amenábar settled on Jersey because its French and English history gave it a mixed Catholic and Protestant religious culture. It was also occupied by Nazi forces during World War II, which fit the movie’s narrative as well as its underlying elements of culpability and guilt. Most of the shooting was done in Madrid, however, with exteriors filmed at a marvelously spooky Spanish palacio. Amenábar took a risk by making the film in English, a language he hadn’t yet mastered, but the spoken dialogue is consistently fine, from the remarkably gifted children no less than from Kidman and the other seasoned professionals. (Amenábar is a self-confident artist, composing the scores for his movies, including this one, without knowing how to read or write music.) A thoroughgoing cinephile, he made The Others with a varied assortment of favorites in mind, from ghost pictures (The Innocents, The Haunting) and horror films (Roman Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby, William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist) to such unexpected titles as Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Rebecca and Robert Mulligan’s 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird. He also admires Peter Medak’s The Changeling, a minor gem from 1980 that the likes of Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro have likewise praised in recent years. Its inspirations and antecedents notwithstanding, though, The Others has a melancholy freshness all its own. 

Like such predecessors as Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, it also has a metaphysical dimension. Amenábar’s parochial education didn’t stick, and he now calls himself an atheist. But he’s clearly fascinated by religious notions—like me, he evidently regards them as a species of supernaturalism that overlaps nicely with fantastical narratives—and his commentary is eloquent on how religion weaves through The Others, which uses Christian symbols, allusions, and images as leitmotifs. Grace talks about the Limbo of Infants, for instance, the zone where children not properly baptized must languish after death; just hearing about this gives chills to Anne and Nicholas, whose smothering home is a sort of limbo in itself, and Amenábar means it to be disturbing, since he resents the “unfairness and cruelty” of a God who dispatches souls to particular shelves of the afterlife “as if we were sausages.” The darkness of the house is a visual counterpart of Grace’s benighted beliefs, and the film traces her journey toward the light she finds at the last moment, “a clearer vision of her world.” Triangular configurations are important in the movie’s framings, the central characters are trios—three family members, three servants—and even the main theme of Amenábar’s score is based on a three-note melody. Grace’s beloved Holy Trinity glimmers through all of these patterns. As for her appearance, Amenábar wanted her to look like “a glamorous nun.”

It's impossible to discuss the ending or the meaning of the film without spoilers, so here goes. In a final twist, it turns out that the real title characters of The Others aren’t intruders from beyond but rather the very people we’ve been watching all this time. After a few premonitory clues to this effect—names on gravestones, photographs of corpses—the aforementioned séance scene barges into the narrative, revealing that Grace, her children, and her servants are themselves the ghosts inhabiting the haunted house. When she learned of her husband’s death on the battlefield, the story now discloses, Grace spun out of control, killing her two children and herself. Their ghosts continued to occupy the house, along with the servants, who have been deceased even longer and are savvy to the whole situation. The enigmatic “others” who have been vexing them are actually a living family that bought the house and now dwells there. Grace was oblivious to the truth because she couldn’t face the reality of her traumatic murder-suicide, barring it from consciousness as firmly as she’s kept sunlight from her home. Now she manages to accept the unhappy facts, and sunlight can enter freely, since the photosensitive kids are already as dead as they can get. And they’ll all have the house to themselves for a while, since the new residents, realizing the place is haunted, are losing no time in moving the hell out.

In the Criterion booklet essay, film and literature scholar Philip Horne calls The Others a “brilliant inversion” of The Innocents, itself based on Henry James’s great 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. In this inversion, the protagonist doesn’t intuit the presence of ghosts but doggedly gets the situation entirely backward and becomes the most dread-inducing figure of all, making us “frightened of her—as she increasingly is of herself, of what she has done, of the acts whose memory she has repressed.” Kidman’s excellent performance makes Grace the palpitating heart of the film, and Horne rightly applauds “the sincerity and profundity of [her] investment and inventiveness, around which everything else is organized.” To which I say “amen.” 

Criterion’s edition looks splendid in both the 4K UHD and Blu-ray formats. The many extras tend to be brief and promotional, but some offer bits of intriguing information. One of the film’s most unnerving passages has Grace coming upon a batch of postmortem photographs, which had a vogue in Victorian England as a way of memorializing departed loved ones; some are authentic vintage items while others were created for the film, and in a short video Amenábar tells how he made a Hitchcockian cameo by posing for one of them. The chief of the visual-effects team, Félix Bergés, conveys the unsurprising fact that filling the grounds with ever-present fog was a daunting technical challenge, and it’s fun to watch Amenábar work on the score at a computer console.

Most of Amenábar’s movies, from his debut feature Thesis (1996) through his relatively recent While at War (2019), strike me as overly calculated and polished, lacking the sense of in-the-moment spontaneity that would bring them fully alive. He often takes on admirably thoughtful topics, however—The Sea Inside (2004), about euthanasia, is a shining example—and The Others falls into that category despite its veneer of generic fantasy. In his commentary Amenábar says it’s a rebuke of the “fanaticism” represented by Grace’s rigid religiosity, the kind of zealotry found everywhere from politics to soccer, putting emotion above rationality and foreclosing empathy with those holding different views. “I’m not scared of dead people,” says the auteur of this richly crafted ghost story. “I’m scared of the living.”

David Sterritt is a Cineaste Contributing Writer and author of fifteen books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2