The Others (2001)

               I’m trying to remember why I saw this movie in the theater when it was first released. I don’t generally see horror movies and I especially don’t see them in theaters. I’ve never been a particular fan of Nicole Kidman, I enjoy her performances just fine but I don’t think her presence has ever tipped me over the edge into seeing anything. The film hung around in theaters for a while and was getting good reviews, but those by themselves wouldn’t have gotten me to grab a ticket. Maybe I don’t remember that far back and I used to go to movies all the time just to see something. Regardless of why I have seen this movie before, which you’d think would disqualify it from being included in the month, but since I’m the one making the rules I decided to watch it anyways. It’s been over twenty years and I was curious to see how it holds up.

              In a direct endorsement of my complaints about 1995’s ‘Haunted,’ this movie works absolutely fine even if you know the ending twist from the very beginning. There are some things were watching from the beginning with the ending in mind helps you catch things you might have missed before. Watching it again just now I get the sense that the movie employs a kind of step-down canal system for audience members: there are about three distinct moments in the movie where it feels like it gives us another big chunk of the solution to its mystery and more and more of the audience twigs to what’s really going on before it’s finally revealed at the end. I kinda want to know the percentage of people who didn’t figure out before it explicitly lays it all out. It was also clearly written with a second or even third viewing in mind as everything makes sense both with and without knowledge of the twist and all of the clues work in the context of the eventual answer. I’m going to end up recommending this movie very highly, so if you’d like to experience the movie for the first time without spoiling anything I’ll nutshell what I’m going to say: Nicole Kidman is very good, the kids are better than you’d expect, the movie plays fair with its mystery, and I feel that the ending is very satisfying.

              This was only writer slash director Alejandro Amenábar’s third feature after ‘Tesis’ in 1996 and ‘Abre los ojos’ in 1997. The latter was remade in 2001 by Cameron Crowe under the name ‘Vanilla Sky,’ starring Tom Cruise. That whole process seems to have brought Amenábar into the orbits of Cruise and Kidman, as the former is listed as a producer on the movie and the latter is the star. It was a huge international success, earning roughly $374 million against a $30 million dollar budget, adjusted for inflation. A decent chunk of that came from Amenábar’s home country of Spain, and for a while it was the highest-grossing movie there of all time.

              For her part Kidman was doing just fine in 2001. She was just coming off of the one-two punch that was ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘Moulin Rouge!’ Her marriage to Tom Cruise had fallen apart earlier in the year and the constant tabloid attention certainly didn’t hurt as a source of free publicity for this. The only other actor who a lot of people might recognize is Christopher Eccleston in a small role, then already well-known to the British tv-watching public but still four years away from his apparently unpleasant stint as the ninth Doctor. I know I recognize Fionnula Flanagan from somewhere, but she has so many credits I’m genuinely unable to narrow it down. She’s been acting since the mid 60’s so I can’t tell if it’s from a role she had in an old episode of “Bonanza” or if it’s one from “American Gods.” The actors playing the kids, Alakina Mann and James Bentley, only have a handful of credits between them. They’re pretty good.

              There’s a fundamental part of the background to the setting that I’m not entirely sure about. The story could have taken place just about anywhere or anywhen, but Amenábar deliberately chose the island of Jersey in the latter half of 1945. For those unfamiliar, The Bailiwick of Jersey is a small island situated in the Channel between England and France. It was occupied by German forces in June of 1940 and remained under their control until the end of the war, at which point the soldiers stationed there peacefully surrendered. During those five years a very tense peace prevailed on the island under German occupation, with some amount of self-rule and most of the civilian population left to their own devices. Near the end of the war supplies and food were running low and many of the residents lacked electricity and depended on Red Cross food parcels to survive. After the war there was some recrimination and accusations of collaboration among the residents, although there were very few prosecutions.

              This does come up in the movie a few different times, albeit obliquely. Grace Stewart, Nicole Kidman’s character, mentions near the beginning that she and her children have learned to live without electricity. When Grace believes intruders have entered her home she loads a shotgun and fiercely mutters to herself that she managed to keep any Nazis from entering her home during the occupation, she’s not going to let people break in now. For most of the movie the family avoids talking about their father because they haven’t heard anything about his fate during the war but are very worried now that peace has been declared and there’s still no news.

              But most of those beats would work just as well anywhere else in the UK, why specifically Jersey? Why pick an island that is specifically not part of the UK and is, in effect, owned directly by the monarchy? The huge house they live in is fairly isolated, but there are plenty of remote estates in England. It might have something to do with Grace’s devout faith in Catholicism, which had a significant presence on the island at the time. Waves of Catholic migrants both from France and Ireland had settled there in the 19^th century. This then raises the question of why Grace being a Catholic is important to the story. It’s woven all the way through, from the opening narration as she gives a children’s version of the story of creation to the conversations on religious doctrine between Grace and her children. I have a couple of guesses. First is that Spain is still a pretty darn Catholic country and perhaps Alejandro Amenábar just wrote what he was familiar with. Another possibility is that Catholicism has acquired a vast number of odd beliefs over the years as it’s absorbed other religions. It also locked up a lot of its best thinkers in monasteries with nothing much better to do that really dig into some metaphysics. There’s a genuine “oh snap” moment in the movie when Grace’s daughter Anne corrects her mother on the official Church doctrine of Limbo. I don’t know the official Church of England position on the existence of ghosts, but if you want a religious character to really have a hard time interacting with spirits I can’t really argue with a Catholic.

              This overt religiosity coupled with the way Kidman plays her with steely control barely concealing an undercurrent of hysteria and a lot of the tension in the movie comes from Grace herself. Near the beginning of the movie she explains to the new staff members and thus the audience the rigid rules that the house operates by: all doors are to always be locked and you must never move from one room to another without the necessary set of keys. This is due to the fact that her children break out in open sores in the presence of too much light. She compares bright light to water on a ship, something that must be kept strictly contained. As she details all this she pauses for a moment and you can almost feel her body bend under the enormous strain she’s under. Over the course of the movie she keeps forgetting the rule about keeping the doors locked under stress, which kind of encapsulates the contradiction in her character. It’s completely understandable that she panics a little when she thinks she hears one of her children in distress, but she’s also the kind of person who would absolutely tear into anyone else who did the same time. I’m surprised that her children turned out as seemingly normal as they did, considering they had such a high-strung mother.

              One thing that the movie could have easily done that I’m very glad it didn’t do is get just a bit too clever with its central conceit. Because it’s a real doozy, if not one hundred percent original: what if you told a ghost story from the ghost’s perspective? This one simple shift turns all of the old cliches on their heads and makes them interesting again. This movie contains a lot of elements I’ve seen before: doors that open and shut on their own, whispers and voices barely on the outside of hearing, objects or furniture moving the moment you look away from them. This also feels like something of a direct response to ‘The Innocents’ as the makeup of the cast is almost identical: two kids, the woman looking after them, and one main servant that she interacts with. Just like in that movie the woman ends up as something like the antagonist by the end. When it’s revealed that she’s perceiving the very much alive people trying to move into the house in much the same way that they’re perceiving her, piecemeal and only partially, a whole lot that’s happened so far in the film make complete sense.

              When you watch it knowing that everyone you’re seeing is already dead you can admire the intelligence of the script. It needs to always be dark and spooky, so give the kids the very-real condition of phototoxicity, that way there’s a reason everyone has to stay inside the house during the day and every curtain and set of drapes become threatening. We’re distracted by the new staff hires getting shown around the manor that Grace’s offhand remark that she woke up one day and the servants were just mysteriously gone gets lost in the conversation. They complain about never having anyone visit and being out of communication with the outside world, but it was right after the war, a lot of things were going on. Of course once the truth is revealed everything gets recontextualized, but they did a very good job of making it seem reasonable that the ghosts might not be ghosts.

              I really like what they did with the servants. It’s eventually revealed that the three of them all died in an outbreak of tuberculosis on the island back in 1891. It’s never explicitly stated but it’s clear from the context that Grace and her children are relatively new ghosts and the older ones took a little time to observe them. They realized that none of them understood that they were dead, so they decided to be nice about it and ease them into it. The main servant, Bertha Mils as played by Fionnula Flanagan, is polite and deferential to Grace for most of the movie, and it’s only in the side looks she gives her or the way she gives comforting asides to the children that indicates something more is going on with her. A lot of the more overt clues about the true nature of the story are dropped by the servants speaking to each other. Eventually she visibly starts losing patience with Grace and starts leaving little clues around. They leave the conversations between the staff members vague enough that they can easily be read as sinister, but on the second time through they read as unexpectedly kind. I also got the sense that there were other ghosts around who hadn’t introduced themselves yet, and it’s almost a comforting idea of the afterlife, that there’s some sense of community among the dead.

              I’m glad they avoided making it explicit that this movie is, in effect, the backstory for the evil spirit in a another movie set in the same house a few decades later. What’s left of Grace, given decades to stew in that estate with only other ghosts to keep her company, could very easily devolve into the kind of murderous ghost seen in movies like ‘Full Circle’ or ‘The Legend of Hell House.’ The final reveal that Grace smothered her children and then blew her head off with a shotgun in a fugue state, coupled with her fierce last line of the movie, “No one can make us leave this house,” really makes me worried about what she’s capable of justifying to herself given enough time. The last image we see is Grace staring out of an upper-floor window, clutching her children to herself, clearly willing to keep them with her for all eternity. She’s just driven out one family, she seems completely capable of driving out any number of others.

              I remember the film as being beautiful and very disconcerting and I’m glad that my memory was correct. It’s never very scary, but it’s not really trying to be. The movie builds up to the reveal that Grace killed her kids and then herself by showing us the kind of woman who would feel driven to that point. She’s a woman placed under so much pressure that she eventually snapped, and all that death has really changed for her is that the children don’t have to be scared of the light anymore. She’s still all alone, still the only person she trusts to take care of her children, and now there’s not even the possibility that they might grow up and move out of their own. She’s still in the exact same position as she was before she blew the top of her head off, except now it’s for forever. This might be the bleakest ending to a movie I’ve seen in quite some time, but I’d still very much recommend it.