se71

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July 06, 2002

The Others

Genuinely chilling ghost story

Nicole Kidman is brilliant as the mother of two children living in a haunted house in the middle of nowhere in 1945. The children are allergic to light, and so the curtains are kept drawn, and to protect them, all the doors are kept locked. As the house is surrounded by fog, our creepy dark atmosphere is assured.

Kidman wakes from a nightmare, and hears the doorbell. Three rather creepy people are at the door applying for jobs and are taken in as gardener (Eric Sykes being fabulously understated) nanny and cleaner. Kidman's daughter can see "the others", people who come to her and talk to her, but who aren't really there. She delights in scaring her brother with this, and we are not quite sure whether she is making it all up or not.

Kidmans husband is absent, missing since the end of the war, and midway through the film she goes walking in the woods and finds him in the fog. He is lost, and is very distracted and distant. Though he comes back to the house for a while, mostly to see his children, he doesn't really talk to his wife and soon leaves again. It's obvious that he was a ghost, and he did really die in the war.

There are an increasing amount of spooky noises, and Kidman makes the servants search the house, but they don't find anything. Then one morning the curtains are all gone, and she makes the servants leave at gunpoint, suspecting them of trying to harm her children.

That night the children go walking in the garden, and find some graves. In a frantic last 5 minutes we learn everything. The servants died at the house more than 50 years ago, Kidman actually killed her children and herself when she heard the news that her husband wouldn't be returning from the war and they don't realise they are dead. "The Others" are the current owners of the house holding seances that contact the dead. The living and the dead are breaking through to each others worlds, and the living owners are so spooked that they leave. Kidman realises what happened, the servants return, and 'life' goes on for them.

This is a scary film, and achieves it's effect with no real violence and absolutely no grissly effects. This is a tribute to the filmmaker's skills, because as the tension rises throughout the film, right up to the tragic denoument, we never get bored by all the ghostly goings on, and actually aren't really sure whether the ghosts are real until about 5 minutes from the end.

Well worth a second watch too, to see the clues that lead to the surprising climax, which is not totally unlike "The Sixth Sense".

AE0

Posted by se71 at July 6, 2002 11:22 AM

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