“The Others” (2001) is an elegant, sinister and stylish ghost story bolstered by Nicole Kidman at her best. There’s an intimate sense of confusion and suspense that pervades this phenomenal haunted mansion tale. Often in horror movies women are in a state of sniveling disarray, but Kidman braves through it, tightly wound and unraveling slowly – questioning her own sanity – until the surprising climactic conclusion when her tears are truly warranted. You cannot take your eyes off her. The film has a hypnotic influence over you because of her – and you feel what she feels.
“The Others” is one of the best ghost stories. Emphasizing mood and psychology – instead of cheap scares – Spanish writer director Alejandro Amenabar exploits our childhood fears of the dark, what’s behind closed doors and closets – or behind curtains. He creates a suggestion of ghosts that are a spooky expansion of our commonplace reality.
The less you know the better the impact. The story unfolds entirely in a cavernous Victorian mansion – where Grace (Kidman) lives alone with her two young children who must live in the dark for they suffer from photosensitivity. It’s the final days of World War II – and her husband is on the front. Three servants show up looking for work, and things start untangling. The daughter – Anne – begins communicating with intruders. Grace believes Anne is telling lies. “Sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living,” advises the new housekeeper. The isolation that Grace has been living in has started to take a toll on her – and the constant fog that surrounds the mansion is a representation of the state she is in.
The filmmaking is a joy to behold. I would encourage you to be aware of the angles and camera work of Amenabar. The first time you see Kidman – he shoots her in an oblique angle (which produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one’s head to the side) – creating a sense of psychological unease – as well as foreshadowing that everything’s upside down in this story. Amenabar will also shoot a scene in high angles (seeing things from above) and start swooping down on the characters – generating a feel that someone is observing. Lights and shadows will play a big role as well – relating the amount of light present in various scenes to the strength of the supernatural or ghostly forces apparently at work. “The only things that move here is the light,” says the housekeeper.
Amenabar scores his own movies – joining a select group of director-composers which includes John Carpenter and Mike Figgis. Influenced by Bernard Herrmann, his soundtrack sustains the stream of tension as well as adding beautiful meditative moments.
Amenabar is quite a talent – and I’d encourage you to see his other films. He helmed the terrific science fiction film called “Open Your Eyes” (1997) starring Penelope Cruz. It was remade by Cameron Crowe as “Vanilla Sky” starring Tom Cruise and Cruz reprising her role from the original. Amenabar’s next film was “The Sea Inside” – a real life story about quadriplegic Ramon Sampedro which won the Oscar for Best Foreign film in 2004. It starred a remarkable Javier Bardem – whose ghostly image fleetingly appears in a painting in “The Others.” Blink and you miss it.
“The Others” showcases all of Nicole Kidman’s strengths. She is in control, until she cannot be anymore. Her ladylikeness co-habits effortlessly with her robustness. I love the fact that Amenabar named her character Grace – for Kidman embodies the adjective – as well as recalling the actress Grace Kelly with her hairdo. She portrays a character who feels deeply isolated from the real world and who steps into a deep state of grief.
“The Others” is a chilling classic.
Anne: “Mummy, I won’t ask for forgiveness for something I didn’t do!”
Grace: “You told your brother there was someone else in the room!”
Anne: “There was!”
Grace: “You’re lying!”
Anne: “I AM NOT!”
Love,
Roger
Available on Hulu, HBO and to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.
Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
Written by Alejandro Amenábar
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Alakina Mann, James Bentley, Fionnula Flanagan
104 minutes
About Writer and Director Alejandro Amenábar
Raised in Spain after his Chile-based parents fled the country shortly before the 1973 right-wing coup d’état, Amenábar decided to be a filmmaker early on, heading to Madrid’s Complutense University to study cinema. Undeterred after his professors flunked him, Amenábar learned the craft firsthand on low-budget productions. Backed by a producer and star he met during his “apprenticeship,” Amenábar burst onto the Spanish film scene at the ripe old age of 23 as writer/director and composer with his first feature, Tesis (1996).
Amenábar then scored an even bigger hit with his next film, Open Your Eyes (1997). It became a blockbuster in Spain, bringing Amenábar his first international distribution and a Sundance Film Festival berth. After composing the scores for the Spanish drama The Butterfly (1999) and his Open Your Eyes collaborator Mateo Gil’s thriller Nobody Knows Anybody (1999), Amenábar made his first foray into Hollywood with The Others. Executively produced by Tom Cruise and starring his then-wife Nicole Kidman. The Others introduced American audiences to Amenábar’s skill at evoking spine-tingling chills without resorting to gory shock techniques. The Others became a late-summer sleeper success.
On the heels of the success of The Others – and given Amenábar’s remarkable ability to elicit chills from an audience as so masterfully displayed in Open Your Eyes – it would have been all to easy to have written the multi-talented filmmaker off as little more than a style minded Hitchcock wannabe. Where many fright-minded filmmakers would be sharpening their knives in hopes of topping their previous efforts, Amenábar instead opted to truly challenge both himself and his audience with The Sea Inside. An affectingly humanistic tale of life and the right to die. The Sea Inside proved such a moving cinematic experience that it was bestowed with the “Best Foreign Language Film” award at the 77th Annual Academy Awards in 2005. His other works include Agora (2009), Regression (2015), While at War (2019) and most recently the Spanish TV series El tesoro del Cisne Negro.(fandango.com)
A Mother’s Ghostly Journey
Amenábar felt that to capture Grace’s journey he would need a woman capable of embodying a roller-coaster range of emotions, from maternal love to creeping paranoia to shattering shock. He also wanted someone with the classical grace and porcelain beauty of a Golden Age leading lady – a sophisticated, headstrong woman for whom a supernatural encounter would be the last thing expected. He found all these qualities in Nicole Kidman.
Kidman was deeply drawn to the mystery inherent in the story and to the torrent of emotions roiling underneath the ghostly events taking place in Grace’s house. “I found myself absolutely fascinated and enchanted with Grace’s story,” she says. “I have never done a supernatural thriller before, which was very intriguing to me, and I knew that with Alejandro I would be in the absolute best of hands.”
For Kidman, it was Amenábar’s unique understanding of how to subtly build fear in audiences that gave her total trust. “It was truly a pleasure to work with such an imaginative and original talent,” she says. “He has an incredible ability to build true suspense, which comes from the heart and mind, from the inside, rather than the outside. He’s not afraid to go to the very darkest places, and he gave me the courage to go there with him as Grace slowly begins to accept that reality is not quite what she thinks it is.”(cinema.com)
The Mansion
It was essential that the mansion itself become another eerie character. Amenábar found his fog-bound exteriors at an old English-style manor in rugged Cantabrie, a city on the misty Atlantic Coast of Spain, which made an excellent stand-in for the Isle of Jersey, which lies 14 miles off the coast of Normandy. Meanwhile, the interiors were specially created on a soundstage in the middle of suburban Madrid. Here, Amenábar and production designer Benjamin Fernandez were able to custom design the dark halls and hidden corners from which surprises emerge.
“The story turns on this house of gray shades and long corridors,” says Amenábar. “In these dark, empty spaces we are bound to bump into the things we most fear.”(cinema.com)