Opinion

The Others

On Jersey, in 1945, Grace and her two children live alone in a large house. The children are photosensitive, forcing Grace to keep the house shrouded in darkness, with all the curtains closed during the daylight hours. Her servants having vanished, the arrival of three replacements seems a Godsend, until she realises that the ad she placed never made it to the newspaper. Then her daughter Anne begins to talk about a little boy, Victor, who only she sees, Grace begins to hear noises herself, and suddenly, the house is full of menace.

The Others is a rarity these days: A horror film that relies on suspense, intensity and the almost unbearable cranking up of tension for its effect instaed of blood, gore, big knives and funny camera work. The post-Scream crowd may be disappointed. I have to say that I wasn't.

This is Amenábar's first English language film, and I think on the strength of this, it won't be his last. Anyone who saw Open Your Eyes should already know to have high expectations, and they won't be disappointed here. The film is a model of carefully orchestrated suspense, playing off horror film conventions and providing them with an unexpected feeling of freshness.

Of course, there are elements of the story that feel a little recycled: haunted house movies are nothing new, though it's a while since one has been done as well as this, and there are other elements that will strike a note of recognition by the end of the film, and actually, there's a hint of The Turn Of The Screw about the whole enterprise. None of which detracts from the film's achievements at all.

The cast is a strong one, with Flanagan's performance a great example of the value of understatement and suggestion over 'drama' and histrionics, and the children are surprisingly un-precocious. But it's Kidman's film, and she knows it. Mixing up a cocktail of repressed emotion, parental love, obsession, denial and ultimately fear, she delivers possibly the strongest performance of her career to date.

To be honest, I twigged what the major revelation was going to be almost from the beginning, and the strength of the film is that I didn't feel I'd lost any of the experience as a result. Amenábar, who wrote as well as directed, and also produced the highly effective score, keeps enough potential explanations on the go that there's a real sense that it could be be any one of them. In fact, at one point, I was momentarily convinced that I'd got it compeltely wrong.

Highly recommended - eight out of ten at least.