By Alejandro Amenábar, 2001.
Starring James Bentley, Elaine Cassidy, Fionnula Flanagan, Nicole Kidman, Alakina Mann, Eric Sykes.
Rating: 7/10, 5/10.
It makes me sad when a movie has such good intentions, and clearly has a lot of talent—in every way—behind it, but still ends up not being particularly good at all. The Others very nearly fits into the genre of the "new thrillers" (Signs, Minority Report, What Lies Beneath, Panic Room, etc.) that make me so happy, but it is by far the most unavoidably flawed of all these efforts.
This is certainly not the fault of the cast, which is impeccable: Kidman turns in one of her best performances ever—up there with To Die For—as the possibly widowed mother of two children in a possibly haunted house. Flanagan is a tremednous actor who does much better than most could with what she was given here. Bentley and Mann, the two young actors who play the children, have immense talent, especially for their ages. The direction is equally faultless: Amenábar shows himself here to be a talented young director (not even 30 years old when he made this), and his control of this film is admirable. The art direction, costuming, set design, and so forth, is again spot-on, and the film is strikingly, perfectly bleak and dreary, if perhaps a bit dependant on fog—which I even mostly forgive, given the film’s setting (near London). It is tempting to lay the blame solely on the alarmingly weak script—yet another example of a very good concept ruined by poor writing—but all of the other elements are so strong that they should be able to overcome even this obstacle, at least in my mind.
So what is wrong with this movie? It’s hard to say. Somehow all of the elements just don’t come together right. The movie moves too slowly. The bad writing seems pushed to the forefront somehow in a way that makes the movie suffer more than most movies that are good aside from the script. I think maybe the main problem is that the writers came up with a great concept (which I will not reveal) and then relied on that to pull them through the whole movie, which never works, ever. Or, OK, hardly ever. It is especially true when that concept takes the form of the surprise ending. If the entire movie relies on the surprise at the very end, the entire rest of the movie suffers immensely. It’s sad, but that’s what happened here, I think.