The Others
Disclaimer:
The movie I’m reviewing this week is rated: PG-13
There is some content unsuitable for children included in this review.
Also: SPOILERS!
As you may have noticed, if you’re a regular follower of my posts, there isn’t really any rhyme or reason to which movies I decide to review on any particular week, but this is one that’s pretty out of nowhere even for me. Taking that out of the equation though, this honestly isn’t a movie I think about too much. Not that I don’t like it, in fact I actually think it’s pretty good. Also, I feel it’s well acted and properly paced for a movie of its kind. In a weird way though, I’m not sure that this is a movie that sticks with me like some other movies I’ve seen, and even some other movies I’ve reviewed. Specifically with the twist that takes place towards the end which no discussion about this movie can go without, it does make me think about what I saw much differently which is very clever (especially upon first viewing), but oddly enough I found myself days later not really thinking about it much. Funny enough, it makes me think more about why it is that I’m not thinking more about this movie.
Maybe that’s just my experience of the film, but we can’t be certain without taking a closer look (and always feel free to let me know in the comments!). Put on your cardigans and take a walk out into the fog with me as we examine The Others!
Firstly, the tone of this movie is well built up to give you the sense that what you’re watching isn’t entirely 100. After all, the opening shot is literally of the protagonist Grace (played by Nicole Kidman) screaming at the top of her lungs after waking up. That’s definitely a way to get our attention. Speaking of Grace, Nicole Kidman really is electric in this role. She does a great job of making us believe that she’s an overworked mother losing her mind in a house by herself and also of getting us to like her before the ending. That and she has a great relationship with her children in the film, Anne and Nicholas (played by Alakina Mann and James Bentley), which helps drive the illusion home and make us care about them more. Each of them feel like real people just trying to live their life in peace during World War II, and while they all can have their unlikable moments, I personally think it adds to their believability and even relatability.
What also helps sell this whole film is how it’s kept focused on this one house. Nothing happens outside of the house in the film, and of course that ties into the twist later, but it also helps the movie stay focused and get us as the audience even more invested with the characters and their situation. This also makes me think how if the twist didn’t happen in this movie, if it were just a self-contained story about a woman and her family doing their best to survive on their own without their father, I think it would’ve worked fine enough. Granted I don’t think as many people would’ve talked about it after seeing it or it would’ve even been as well received as it was by audiences, but the story and characters could’ve supported it enough on its own to create a different enough fictional period piece. I know I’m mentioning the twist a lot without actually mentioning it, but that is the main thing in this movie people remember and for good reason. Especially considering that this movie clearly takes after The Sixth Sense quite a bit where the twist is the main crux of the movie and the primary reason to watch it in the first place, you can see why most people discuss it. Don’t worry though, we’ll get there in due time.
Soon after the film starts, Grace and her family are visited by three people hoping to be hired to look after the place for them. Their names are Mrs. Bertha Mills (played by Fionnula Flanagan), Mr. Edmund Tuttle (played by Eric Sykes) and Lydia (played by Elaine Cassidy). Grace shows them around the house wasting no time giving them a laundry list of rules while also explaining how her children are sensitive to light and every room they’re in has to have the curtains drawn. While this may seem like a plot device, mostly because it is, it is also a real thing. On the DVD special features there’s a section dedicated to explaining the children’s condition which is called ‘xeroderma pigmentosum’. It can result in harsh skin irritation given prolonged exposure to sunlight which can also lead to the development of malignant tumors and eventually neurologic degeneration according to the National Library of Medicine (yes I Googled this).
Another way they add to the idea that what you’re seeing as the audience member isn’t the full picture is how it’s explained that Grace suffers from chronic migraines and she takes medication to deal with it. You could reasonably assume at certain points in the movie that maybe what she’s experiencing could just be hallucinations brought about by her medication as well. Only because this takes place in 1945, I find it very unlikely that a potential Excedrin Migraine side effect would be cinematic paranormal hallucinations. Heck, even the movie suggests as much, since there’s a later scene after Grace manhandles Anne during one of her hallucinations that Grace decides to wash her medication down the drain since she thinks it could be affecting her mental state.
This goes on for quite a while, with us just in the house experiencing the lives of these people and the strangeness of random supernatural occurrences from time to time until Grace decides to leave the house. The reason she does this is because, for some reason, she tried to get an advertisement posted in the paper for people to come and help her take care of the house, but it never got published. Yet, for some reason, Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia still came to the house anyway even though they shouldn’t have had any knowledge of the job opening. So yeah, this movie is like 70-80% foreshadowing (much like The Sixth Sense before it), but Grace’s decision to leave does introduce us to my personal favorite character: Grace’s husband Charles (played by underappreciate Dr. Who number 9: Christopher Eccleston).
Since the fog surrounding their house is so thick, instead of making it to her desired destination, Grace just bumps into him out of nowhere. He’s supposed to be on active duty in World War II, but she finds him here for some reason. Odd. They go back home together and have a cute little reunion with Anne and Nicholas, but Charles doesn’t seem very happy. Despite being back home with his family that he loves, he has this air of depression around him that doesn’t let up, even when he’s alone with his wife. Like most other things in this movie it’ll make more sense after the big reveal, but for now it’s just weird. Not one day after Charles’ return as well, he tells Grace that he can’t stay and he only came back to say goodbye since he now has to return to his duty. Grace naturally doesn’t take this well, but they share a night of passion and Charles slips out undetected.
Things only seem to get worse and worse in regards to the paranormal happenings in the house because the family wakes up soon after Charles leaves to find that all of the curtains in the house have been taken down. Since you may remember the children are incredibly photosensitive, they end up freaking out and sounding the alarm to the three housekeepers. Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia however don’t seem startled by this revelation however, almost as if they knew this was something that would happen at some point or another, and they try to talk Grace down from a freak out. This doesn’t work though and only causes Grace to grab the in-house shotgun and threaten the housekeepers to hand over the keys to the palace or else. Eventually they leave which is when the climax officially starts and everything falls into place.
Anne decides to run away since she still believes her mom is going crazy (and you can’t really blame her after practically being strangled by her after a weird paranormal occurrence), and Nicholas follows close behind which leads them to the house’s garden where they discover some gravestones. These gravestones are scary since they’re the gravestones of Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia! Oh my god, they were ghosts the whole time! Funny enough, this isn’t actually the biggest reveal the movie has to offer, because soon after this is found out the three of them come out of the woods and try to coax the children to come with them. At this point the kids are thoroughly creeped out, so they run back to the house to warn their mother. Once they meet up, they see that the ex-housekeepers weren’t too far behind. To protect the kids, Grace tells them to go upstairs and hide while she takes care of the ghosts.
However, the ghosts explain that the paranormal stuff that’s been going on this whole time wasn’t their doing. There are other intruders in the house besides them that could prove a threat to Grace’s family, and as soon as this is discovered we hear Anne and Nicholas scream upstairs. We follow Grace up the stairs into the room where the kids are and we find another group of people sitting at a table doing a…séance? They’re asking questions like “Tell us what happened to you” and “Why are you here?” When Anne approaches the medium after these questions are posed, the medium scribbles on a sheet of paper what looks like pillows causing another person at the table to ask “Is that how you died? You were suffocated by a pillow?” Everything starts to go chaotic as Anne, Nicholas, and Grace all start shouting how they’re not dead. But in fact, they are. That’s the big twist everybody, the whole time Anne, Nicholas, and Grace were also dead!
How they explain it in the movie is that Grace, while Charles was away in the war, got incredibly lonely and even expected him to have died in the war, and all the while she was stuck at home having to take care of two very high-maintenance kids without anyone else to talk to. So when Grace is at her wit’s end, she takes a pillow and smothers her children while they’re asleep, and once she’s done she takes the shotgun and shoots herself. Especially considering how much I was liking Grace up until this point, not necessarily as the most virtuous character I’ve seen but at least someone that seemed human and believable, I was completely crushed when I found this out. Also considering how earlier in the movie when she was talking to Charles and she mentioned that she would die before hurting the children, this just proves her hypocrisy as well which makes this a perfect blend of shock and betrayal.
Yeah, so not gonna lie, the first time I saw this I was totally stunned. This was incredibly well built up and there were clues everywhere throughout the movie hinting at this eventual twist which made it all the more believable. It also makes rewatching the film that much more interesting as you can see how many different ways they tried to convey this message early on. This is also why Charles is my favorite character in the movie since I think he worked as the perfect exemplifier of what this twist was building up to. Grace suddenly comes across him out of nowhere, because as others in Grace’s social circle had mentioned before, Charles did die in the war which is why she found him there, he was a lost wandering soul returning to a familiar place during his life. Charles is depressed and sad the whole time because, unlike Grace, he’s fully aware that he’s passed and by seeing Grace in this place (Oh, rhyme), he knows that she not only did something to herself, but the children as well. He also eventually ends up leaving to “return to the front” since souls are tied to the places they died. In the end he was right, he was only there to see her and the children one last time and say goodbye to them, but he wasn’t expecting to actually have a final conversation with their spirits. It really makes his scenes more emotionally powerful as well.
On top of that, pretty much everything else in the movie was building up to this moment as well. Lydia didn’t talk throughout the movie, not because she was born without the ability to speak, but because upon the discovery of her being dead, she couldn’t handle the realization and stopped talking. The pictures that Grace found in the house and showed to Mrs. Mills of dead people sets up the eventual discovery of the housekeepers being dead when Grace finds their postmortem photo-ops. Just the general vibe of the housekeepers throughout the movie when they’re by themselves gives off the energy that they know more about the situation than they’re letting on and are even actively orchestrating events to happen in a certain way when we see Mr. Tuttle cover up their graves with piles of leaves. The scene with Grace and the self-playing piano/door shenanigans, when Grace heard footsteps coming from the statue room, Anne and her communications with Victor (played by Alexander Vince), when Anne takes on the appearance of the medium seen in the climax and Grace attacks her, how when the children were ever exposed to light it never did anything, all of it was building up to this moment. They’re dead. They were always dead.
In the end Grace has a little monologue with her children in her arms about how she killed them, they proclaim that the house is theirs, Mrs. Mills offers some comforting postmortem sentiments, and the family that was being haunted by our main characters leave the house. Ultimately the house is put up for sale, and the audience is left in shock putting all of the previous pieces together to formulate the entire picture this movie gave them, which is a detailed one to say the least. Outside of that though, I still can’t help but feel a certain…emptiness with this movie. Let’s go into more detail with the conclusion.
While I can’t deny that there are things I like about this movie from the casual lowkey-ness of it all, the stylistic period piece aesthetic, the outstanding acting, and the consistently well-balanced tone, I feel like there was a bit of a disconnect with the characters. Not that they weren’t well written or well acted, but I think their memorability is what fell flat for me. Upon rewatching this movie, I legit forgot most of these characters’ names before having them spelled out to me again just because I think they’re less well-defined as people and more vessels to make the story happen. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like these characters serve their respective purposes well, but I just feel like they could’ve been more distinct as people as opposed to just characters. Does that make sense?
When it comes to movies such as The Sixth Sense or Hereditary that have a similar vibes to The Others, each of the characters from those stories I remember to this day. Each of them were not only well-written and served a specific purpose for the story, but they also had distinct, identifiable personalities that helped them stand out and help me to remember them far into the future. I think that’s where this movie dropped the ball a bit. I will say that it is still enjoyable to watch even just for the sake of watching it with people who haven’t seen it before just to see their reaction because there is even enjoyment in that. So taking my very specific problems with the movie out of the equation, I’ll still say that overall it’s a fun, suspenseful experience that takes you through some eerie twists and turns and eventually will leave you speechless.
For my rating, I’d say that this movie has earned itself a solid 3.5/5 “I see dead people.” Others would probably rate it higher, but this is my blog and I don’t wanna lie about my opinion. Also, enjoy this classic .gif:
(I make no claim of ownership for the images used in this post)
(Each of them are owned by their respective copyright holders, which are not me)
(I am just a humble blogger who talks about movies, I do not make them)
(Yet)
