The Others: Something in This House

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.”

It was a mystery that, upon the film’s stateside release in August 2001, proved intriguing to the public. Between them, Amenábar and Kidman had produced a surprise hit. The movie’s distributor, Dimension Films, cannily added “a couple of hundred screens each week, rather than foisting the pic whole hog onto the marketplace,” as Variety reported that October—helping the subdued, heartfelt period film to find its audience. Among the many favorable notices in the press was a tribute by Amenábar’s fellow director Anthony Minghella in the New York Times: “The austere aural landscape of The Others makes us listen in the same way as we do when disturbed from sleep, decoding each distant rustle in the darkness, assigning it a malevolent purpose . . . This is the quietest horror movie in years.”

The Others wears its gothic-horror influences on its sleeve, but it has steadily become clearer, in the time since its original release, that the film is actually on a level with those predecessors. One particular comparison may serve to further illustrate the film’s emotional depth and narrative intricacy. In a 2017 interview, Amenábar was asked, “Do you agree that The Others is in many ways your ‘remake’ of The Innocents?”—and he answered a little evasively. “One of my references was The Innocents . . . It’s just beautiful and still scary.” The Others is in fact less a “remake” than a brilliant inversion of Clayton’s adaptation, scripted by Truman Capote, William Archibald, and John Mortimer, of Henry James’s great 1898 ghost story The Turn of the Screw.

It certainly applies the insight James uttered in his 1908 preface to the tale: “Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.” Amenábar likewise enlists his audience’s minds to construct their own terrifying experiences, so that they fill the dark, quiet spaces he lays out as traps.

The Others’ deviations from The Innocents are deliberate, offering us familiar-seeming situations only to wrong-foot and unsettle us. James has three significant servants or employees, since a governess is not strictly speaking a servant: Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper; Peter Quint; and Miss Jessel (albeit the latter two are already predatory ghosts). The Others, too, has three servants, but instead of our heroine arriving at a house these servants occupy or haunt, Amenábar has her already in the house, mysteriously servantless, when the new staff arrive at the start. The scene where Grace searches the lumber room full of items wrapped in white sheets is a clear variant on The Innocents’ hide-and-seek scene in an attic, where Deborah Kerr’s governess finds a music box and a miniature portrait of the evil Quint. Here, though, while we get some shocks (a sinister face in the gloom turns out to be an old portrait), whatever is hiding in the room slips out again—and Grace finds nothing. She whisks the cover off a mirror but sees only herself and the open door behind her. Amenábar is creatively misdirecting and teasingly throwing off-balance spectators who know Clayton’s film. To know The Innocents is not therefore to know what will happen in The Others—quite the reverse.