Alejandro Amenábar wrote, directed and scored The Others, and he built it on a single cruel idea: a mother who cannot let light into her house because light will hurt her children. Grace Stewart, played by Nicole Kidman, keeps every curtain drawn in a remote country house on Jersey in 1945. Anne and Nicholas have a rare sensitivity to light. Then three servants arrive looking for work, and the dark house starts making noise.
Trailer, via STUDIOCANAL.
Mrs. Bertha Mills and the Servants Who Came Back
Fionnula Flanagan plays Mrs. Mills, the housekeeper. Eric Sykes is the gardener, Edmund Tuttle, and Elaine Cassidy is Lydia, the maid. Grace hires all three, then learns they worked in the house years earlier. Anne, played by Alakina Mann, says a boy named Victor visits her, along with his parents and an elderly blind woman. Grace calls it a fantasy until she hears footsteps and voices and orders the house searched.
In a storage room she finds a nineteenth-century album of photographs of corpses. Mrs. Mills says many people left the house in 1891 because of tuberculosis. Grace, a Catholic, cannot square any of it with her faith. A piano plays by itself. She runs out to find a priest.
Charles Returns From the War
In the woods Grace meets her husband Charles, played by Christopher Eccleston, whom she believed was killed in World War II. She brings him home. He tells her he must go back to the front and rejects her insistence that the war is over. He leaves the next morning.
Sooner or later they’ll find you.
That tagline is the whole machine. Amenábar keeps the house dark, keeps the camera close to Kidman, and lets the dread build from ordinary things — curtains, a locked room, a dress. The album of corpse photographs is the one image that lands hardest, because it turns a haunted-house story into a story about what a family buries.
Kidman carries it. Her Grace is not a scream queen; she is a woman holding a household together by force of will, and the performance is why the film works when the plot turns. The Others grossed $210 million worldwide on a $17 million budget.
It earned fifteen nominations at the 16th Goya Awards and won eight, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay — the first English-language film without Spanish dialogue to take Best Film there.
At the 28th Saturn Awards it received six nominations and won Best Horror Film, Best Actress for Kidman and Best Supporting Actress for Flanagan. Kidman was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the 55th British Academy Film Awards, where the film was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay. She was nominated for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama at the 59th Golden Globe Awards.
The twist is famous now, and fame dulls it. What holds up is the restraint: Amenábar never shows more than he needs to, and the light sensitivity gives the darkness a reason. It is a ghost story that trusts its audience to sit in the dark with it.
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