The Others: Something in This House

A beautiful, intense woman stands in a large, dusky room, lit only by an oil lamp, her eyes wide in concern and something not far from panic, her eyebrows tremulously registering every thought and fear that passes through her mind, as she listens to the terrible quiet of the big house where she lives with her two children. In Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001)—a fog-enshrouded ghost story set on the English Channel island of Jersey, in the immediate aftermath of its liberation from the Nazis—the central character’s quicksilver shifts of emotion are registered with such extreme delicacy that we are irresistibly drawn into her world of apprehensions. We cannot help admiring the courage of Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) as she moves through dark corridors and chambers that she suspects are haunted, a lamp in one hand and often a shotgun in the other—even if at the same time we are frightened of her in her brittle compulsiveness, her dangerous readiness to overreact.

One of the other charged images that The Others sears in our minds: Grace’s very small, moonfaced son sitting at a large table, a single lamp marooning him with his schoolwork in a small pool of light, seized with terror as he looks round the shadowy reaches of the huge room where he has been locked in alone despite his protestations, on his mother’s insistence that he imagine the part of hell reserved for bad children. This beautiful but threatening image in fact harks back to the personal source material of this hypersensitized, psychological distillation of gothic-horror elements, Amenábar’s third feature after the darkly impressive Thesis (1996) and the wildly ingenious Open Your Eyes (1997): the director’s own youth. “My childhood was beset by fears—fear of the dark, fear of half-open doors, fear of closets, and, generally speaking, fear of anything that could conceal someone or ‘something,’ ” Amenábar, who was born in Chile and raised in Spain (where his family relocated just days before Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup), has said. “Thus, it is no surprise that I should become an avid devotee of the occult film.”

By the time he began developing The Others, though, Amenábar had become frustrated with many tendencies of contemporary horror, from its knowingness and in-jokes (e.g., the Scream films) to its gory, expensive, and naive special effects (e.g., Jan de Bont’s 1999 remake of The Haunting). Before embarking on his script for a horror film without blood or effects, Amenábar set about studying the supernatural atmospherics of many classics of the genre—chiefly Robert Wise’s original version of The Haunting (1963) and Jack Clayton’s 1961 The Innocents (of this second, more later), but also Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), with its iron gates to Manderley; Peter Medak’s The Changeling (1980), with its tense mood and story of infanticide; and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (also 1980), with its terrifying corridors and panic-inducing twins. He also drew on the gothic house in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955). For The Others, Amenábar later said, “I put these haunted-house films together, and I had a little trick for the end.”

Such modesty, however, understates his task and his achievement. On paper, the film might sound familiar, with its isolated and echoing old house, its grieving heroine and master missing in action, and its uncanny children, not to mention its three servants—housekeeper Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), the mute maid (Elaine Cassidy), and the old gardener (Eric Sykes)—who mysteriously turn up out of the fog. But these somewhat conventional properties are handled with taste and restraint, and an edge of wit, and then the film also has a very distinctive look, deriving from its novel premise, of children with photophobia. The real-life medical condition, which Amenábar had first come across in a news story, results here in a strange, disturbing routine that the twitchily anxious Grace explains to her new staff as a matter of life and death. The need to protect her children from exposure to sunlight is a potent objective correlative for repression; it gives rise to the brilliant idea of the fifteen keys and fifty rooms, which makes the excessively large house a prison, with Grace as a jailer striving to keep unruly forces under control. And as rooms are darkened with the drawing of curtains or the closing of doors, we get partial fade effects on faces and interiors that fit in with the eloquent use of fades, often quick and pointed, between scenes. The house itself almost becomes a character—or a field on which light and dark fight it out: Amenábar told his cinematographer, the brilliant Javier Aguirresarobe, to work from the principle that “light kills,” and the set design by Benjamín Fernández, very naturally in period, is full of browns and silvery grays when autumnal daylight filters in, but, when it’s shut out, conjures areas of deep shadow that ache with potential threat.

While Grace’s obsession with keeping things dark seems basically reasonable, given that her children’s lives are at stake, the hellish oppression of her preventative routines gets to us—as it does to Grace herself. “The only thing that moves here is the light,” she says at one point. “But it changes everything. It’s rather difficult, to say the least. One might almost say unbearable.”

If the way the film plunges us into near-darkness is one of its most brilliant inventions, a charged stylistic decision that cannot be detached from the core of the story, Amenábar is equally radical in the sound world he creates. Grace remarks to the servants when they arrive, “Silence is something that we prize very highly in this house.” The quietness forces one to attend closely, and stirs up the imagination. Correspondingly, the score for the film, composed by Amenábar himself, helps bring out the melancholy of Grace and the children, taking the film much deeper than the genre normally requires. The score recalls the work of one of his favorite composers, Bernard Herrmann: tragic, obsessive, neurologically thrilling.

But it is Amenábar’s intimate creative collaboration with Kidman that above all defines the film. For Kidman herself, shooting in northern Spain with a Spanish crew, the making of the film was an intense experience. By the time she arrived on set, she has said, “I was having nightmares, and it had really seeped into my consciousness . . . Really, this film was about the two of us working together to create this woman.” The combination is compelling; Amenábar and Kidman’s joint dramatization of extreme repression—sexual, religious, emotional—builds palpably toward some explosive reckoning. What carries us through the film, and gives it a human depth that is tragic and truly touching, is ultimately the sincerity and profundity of Kidman’s investment and inventiveness, around which everything else is organized.

Her performance is magnificent, but, we should remind ourselves, could not register so poignantly were it not for so many other elements of The Others—not least the uncanny brilliance of the child actors who play Anne and Nicholas (Alakina Mann and James Bentley, neither of whom has continued acting in films). Their sober, intense performances remind us how momentous children’s lives feel to them—and that they are at the mercy of those placed in authority over them. The other especially notable role is that of the housekeeper, played by Flanagan, a veteran Irish actor, with great wisdom and kindliness and yet an edge of menace. Flanagan has summarized the theme of the film suggestively: “the mystery of who we are and what we know and don’t know about ourselves.”

In one sense, The Others could be thought of as deliberately the opposite of The Innocents: Grace is in desperate denial of the presence of ghosts, seen or acknowledged by the children and the servants; in The Innocents, the governess insists the ghosts of Quint and Jessel exist, but they’re not seen by Mrs. Grose, nor (it seems) by the children. The governess’s voice-over at the start of The Innocents insists (too much) that “all I want to do is save the children. Not destroy them. More than anything, I love the children.” And the neurotic insistences by Grace, similarly anxious to save her children (not destroy them), are the core of The Others.

The close kinship in situation, character, and event marks a true continuity between Clayton’s film and Amenábar’s. In both, a zealously religious, highly strung heroine, despite her intense love and care for a boy and girl, lacks the sympathetic imagination and the playfulness that might hold back her impulses to punish or to condemn, provoking the girl by her accusations to violent resistance; in both, she finally causes the death of at least one child. In The Others, Grace declares that “there is something in this house. Something diabolic. Something which is not at rest.” But this perhaps diabolic, certainly restless “something” turns out to be Grace herself. We realize as the film goes on that we are primarily becoming frightened of her—as she increasingly is of herself, of what she has done, of the acts whose memory she has repressed.

Perhaps, too, we are frightened of the uncanny narrative logic of the film as it propels us ineluctably toward a confrontation with these hidden truths. We care for Grace; she tenderly loves the children; the children even love her. But there is something terrible and human in her that Nicole Kidman has somehow made appallingly real to herself and that Amenábar has made convincing to us, something that has driven her to commit the unthinkable acts that the film’s end leaves us contemplating in horror. The terrifying discovery—as it perhaps should be in all serious horror films—is a self-discovery.

The Others: Something in This House

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