The Big Picture

• The Others subverts expectations with a twist ending that challenges viewer's narrative predictions.
• Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Grace highlights a complex, rigid protagonist battling emotional turmoil and eerie occurrences.
• The film expertly navigates tension, revealing the family as ghosts, touching on themes of loss, denial, and acceptance.

The ghost story is a tireless movie-making springboard. It's a genre that continues to get significant mileage out of a typically fairly straightforward concept. Unsuspecting tenants become aware of, or inadvertently stir up, vengeful, restless (and oftentimes malignant) spirits who dish out an almighty bedeviling. The Others on the other hand subverts expectations with a deft hand and surprises viewers accustomed to predicting every narrative arc. The (quite literally) table-turning ending will find a special place in the minds of horror aficionados for a long time to come, and it's a credit to the prowess of all involved that the film achieves this effect. Sure, bumps in the night are scay, but a broken home quivering beneath a sheet of claustrophobia and misplaced faith back-dropped by war-torn Europe is an especially intriguing setup that stars Nicole Kidman. Isolation is one thing, desertion is another, and nothing has been the same since the day "mommy went mad."

Nicole Kidman Plays a Complicated, Rigid Protagonist

Nicole Kidman's Grace (a finely-tuned performance) fits the mold of an unreliable narrator to begin with in much the same way the governess in Henry James' novella Turn of the Screw was - an obvious thematic touch-point for director Alejandro Amenábar. She is consumed by her rigid morality, is plagued by headaches that adversely affect her moods. Grace seems to be almost willfully ignorant of the alarming happenings that start to encroach in on her. The lines between what is real and dreamed are quite quickly blurred. Exactly what sins has she committed in her own past?

The opening shots of their cavernous Jersey Island home show that it is shrouded in a dank mist and is incongruously large — too big to house a modest family of three. The family at the center of all of this has been abandoned. Twice. Once by family patriarch Charles (Christopher Eccleston) who took off to fight in World War II, and again without warning by a group of servants. When a trio of new servants show up, elderly gardener Mr. Tuttle (Eric Sykes), young girl named Lydia (Elaine Cassidy) who doesn't speak, and apparent ringleader Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), to replace the others, they too have experienced their own crushing loss.

Given the volatility of its main character, The Others suggests the real danger might lie right in front of us and is not slinking in the shadows. Grace is dogmatic and strict with her son, Nicholas (James Bentley), and daughter, Anne (Alakina Mann). The audience is given a keen sense of her tether being stretched taut as a result of her uncompromising circumstances. There are ghosts everywhere, well before Anne starts drawing pictures of the spirits in the house (carefully placing a number next to each specter denoting how many times she's seen them).

'The Others' Keeps the Audience in the Dark

Grace is at the brink of a breaking point after being forced to fend for herself and her young children who are sensitive to light as the fog continues to choke the humanity out of her lightless household. The new servants appear to have an agenda of their own. Doors of all kinds are opened and shut once the defiant Anne strongly insists that there are apparitions within their walls. As a result, Grace must then confront her religion and wartime paranoia to come to terms with the inexplicable specters flooding every passageway.

The Others is a fresh take on the genre in many ways, but its originality lies in its emotional heft and in the way it credibly flips the haunted house archetype on its head. The greatest terror the film explores is the one linked to coming to terms with new realities. Facing unspeakable truths takes courage, and the otherworldly souls taking over the home are actually there to shine light on a new situation, one far removed from how everything appears on the surface.

Amenábar suggests that the "ghosts" aren't necessarily the ones to fear — these ghosts represent change. Something has shifted since the original servants left. There is a reason why the grounds of their home seem inescapable (evidenced when Grace ventures out onto the grounds only to be thwarted by the cold heavy atmosphere). Why is their home now a stifling prison?

'The Others' Builds Tension as It Slowly Reveals the Truth

There is a constant battle between Grace and her daughter, Anne, and a lot of the tension has to do with the former's unwavering religious beliefs, which are starkly at odds with Anne's growing skepticism and assertion that supernatural elements are crowding their living spaces. Of course, Anne has been interacting with the intruders for a long time before Grace actually begins to buy into the idea. The scene where she argues with the voice of an unseen boy wrings early M. Night Shyamalan levels of fear out of the viewer.

It's a film that'll psychologically burrow under your skin. The Others slowly builds toward a stunning reveal. A book of the dead featuring propped up corpses further leans into the recurring idea of a refusal to let go. Grace maintains her husband will return from the war despite the assumption he's long dead, and in a way, he does come back. Albeit not in the form she would have expected. His reappearance, shuffling out of the fog to the score of clanking chains (brilliant foreshadowing) is very much a short-lived one. Charles' reemergence is the first full-blown hint at what's to come as he presses Grace on "what happened that day."

What Are the Plot Twists of 'The Others'?

The first of the two big twists is expertly handled.After their father abandons them again, Anne and Nicholas make a break for it. They plunge into the night to escape their home. It's here that the director ratchets the tension up beautifully — cross-cutting between two scenes, both of which lift the sheet on who their new servants really are (or were). Moonlit gravestones eerily reflect the names of the servant trio etched into stone, confirming that they are dead, while Grace notices a photo partially concealed beneath Mrs Mills' bed in her living quarters. To her horror, it is a picture containing all three of the servants' photographed corpses in keeping with the Book of the Dead shown earlier in the film — a superstition of the time that Mills seemed to know a great deal about...

The retrospective foreshadowing here is never heavy-handed. Even knowing the twist, The Others is a Gothic horror movie you can watch multiple times to keep picking up the subtle narrative crumbs sprinkled throughout the plot. Once the shock of the first reveal subsides, the last act terrifies, confounds and moves in equal measure. The second twist reveals that Grace and her kids are dead. Anne whispers the truth behind the reality of the "new situation" to a medium, someone who Anne has previously feared without knowing who she is. This is when we learn that, devastated by the death of Charles, Grace tragically killed her two children.

The "ghosts" we have been led to believe are the intruders are actually the new family members who now live in Grace's home. The actual specters are Grace, Anne, and Nicholas. The role reversal device caps off a stunning film. The Others earns its scares and seeks to illuminate the ghosts of the past we all often try to suppress. It's built upon the horror of desertion, the pain of loss, and the dichotomy between denial and acceptance. The Others is superbly made and a cornerstone for those looking to be both surprised and moved by this grim tale.

The Others is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime.

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