The action of the ghost story
The Others,
directed by Alejandro Amenábar, unfolds on Jersey in the Channel Islands off
the British coast immediately following the end of
World War II. Grace (Nicole Kidman) lives in a huge mansion permanently
enshrouded by fog with her two children, Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James
Bentley). Since the two children suffer from a potentially fatal allergic
sensitivity to light, Grace keeps all the curtains drawn whenever Anne and
Nicholas are about, further heightening the sense of gloom already created by
the remote, eerie locale.
Immediately following the opening shots, a trio
of domestics, a gardener, a mute girl, and a housekeeper, Mrs. Bertha Mills (Fionnula
Flanagan) appear at the front door, apparently in response to a newspaper
advertisement by Grace, whose servants have all left the house. Soon after, when
Anne begins seeing troubling apparitions, Grace treats it as a juvenile prank,
and punishes her daughter. But Anne holds her ground, and the incidents become
more disturbing, affecting Nicholas as well. The mystery only grows when it is
revealed that the servants have not answered an ad, but had previously worked at
the house.
During this period, Grace's husband, Charles
(Christopher Eccleston) has been presumed missing in action. But when Grace
after an attack of ghosts goes in search of the local priest, she encounters
Charles, returned from the front and wandering about in the fog in a near
catatonic state. Although he agrees to return with her to the house, where he is
welcomed by the children, he quickly retreats to the couple's bedroom without
being able to offer any explanation for his odd behavior. Eventually, he departs
again with only a cryptic allusion to a scene that had taken place before the
action commences.
Needless to say, there is an explanation for all
these uncanny occurrences, and a highly ingenious one at that, but I will not
reveal more in order to avoid spoiling the movie for anyone who hasn't yet seen
it. Quite wisely, Amenábar plays his cards very carefully in working up to the
denouement, and resists the temptation to tip his hand before the game is
finished, although some viewers may pick up on a few clues he throws out here
and there. The Others is suave rather than shocking, which may disappoint some
people, but I found the journey from beginning to end a pleasurable one, like a
guided tour of a stately haunted house in the English countryside.
The legion of horror films is endless--the
history of the genre goes back almost to the earliest days of the cinema--but
bona fide ghost stories are not so common on celluloid. The memorable examples
that come to mind among English language productions are Lewis Allen's The
Uninvited (1944), Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), adapted from Henry
James's Turn of the Screw by way of William Archibald's
stage version and a screenplay by Truman Capote, and Robert Wise's The
Haunting (1963), based upon the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, as
well as the brilliant episode ("The Mirror") directed by Robert Hamer in the collective
British effort Dead of Night (1945).
Parenthetically, I should note that the ghost
genre has probably flourished more on Japanese soil than anywhere else. Kenji
Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953), certainly one of the greatest films ever made,
brilliantly blends realistic with ghostly motifs, although it would be as
silly to just call it a "ghost story" as it would be to label D. W.
Griffith's Intolerance a "historical spectacle." At a somewhat lower
level, Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964), which draws upon Lafcadio Hearn's
redactions of traditional Japanese stories, boasts some impressive anamorphic
cinematography by Yoshio Miyajima, a score by Toru Takemitsu, and includes one
memorable episode, "Earless Hochi."
In fact, it is probably
indicative that the ghost story picture in Europe or this country more often serves as the vehicle for comedy than
horror--it is only necessary to think of such classics as Rene Clair's The Ghost
Goes West, Norman Z. McLeod's Topper, or the David Lean adaptation of Noel
Coward's hit play Blithe Spirit. Nor is it hard to see why. The author of a
ghost story can afford to merely suggest phantoms, but audiences want a more
tangible embodiment of their deepest fears. Thus there are many film versions of
Frankenstein and Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but as far as I know only one screen
adaptation of Henry James's great ghostly tale The Turn of the Screw.
Nicole Kidman is quite good in
The Others--she is
a beautiful young woman, and she reminded me of Grace Kelly in some shots--although
the film in no way affords the showcase for her talents that Moulin Rouge!
did. Like Kelly, Kidman is strikingly photogenic, and she has
Kelly's ability to suggest an aura of highly charged sexuality. There the
similarity ends. It is remotely possible to imagine Kidman in Alfred Hitchcock's
Rear Window, but not at all Kelly in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
As Brad Lang reminded me in an e-mail, Kelly was strictly a class act.
In a movie of this kind, atmosphere counts for
everything. Although Amenábar and his director of photographer, Javier
Aguirresarobe, do not quite match the work of Tim Burton and Emmanuel Lubezki in
Sleepy
Hollow, they still do a very effective job of conjuring
up a setting that seems completely cut off from the ordinary world, an annex to
"the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" that never completely reveals
itself to the light of day. Small wonder that a place like this would
turn out to be
haunted! The Others is probably a trifle too genteel for its own good, but it
maintains the appropriate tone right up to the last shot. It would be going a bit far to call
The Others
well-made, but mercifully it just avoids being slick.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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