Journal of American Studies of Turkey

13(2001) : 91-93

Film Review

Alejandro Amenabár: The Others (2001)

Seçil Saraçlı

The Others is Spanish director Alejandro Amenabár’s first English language film. After his 1997 film Abre los ojos’ great commercial success, actor Tom Cruise would be agreed to starred in its Hollywood version Vanilla Sky (2001) and to be the producer of The Others starring Nicole Kidman (Cruise’s former wife).

The Others is set in the late 1945, just as World War II ended, in the isle of Jersey, in the English Channel. Grace (Nicole Kidman) lives in a remote and isolated mansion with her two young children, who are afflicted with a strange and terrible malady that makes it essential for them not to be exposed to daylight. Since bright light causes them to break out in sores that can be fatal, all the windows must be covered with thick curtains. As Grace moves from room to room, she carries a heavy ring of keys with which she unlocks each door and locks it again behind her to ensure against one being carelessly opened or left ajar to let in lethal daylight. In this deteoriating mansion there are 50 doors and 15 keys. Besides, during the occupation of the island, the Germans cut off the electricity and for the sake of children, Grace never restored it. Needless to say, without electricity and with the dense fog constantly enshrouding the creepy house, they are enveloped in almost total darkness. Moreover, in one night, the house’s staff has simply vanished without even bothering to collect their wages. Consequently, Grace now has to employ three strangers who appear rather mysteriously out of the fog on the doorstep looking for work. They say they worked in the mansion, years ago, for previous owners and apparently they know something more about the house that Grace does not.

Grace seems to be a strong, authoritarian woman when giving orders to the new servants of the house, though she has to deal with lots of problems related to the house and her children: And although World War II has ended, her husband hasn’t returned home, or even sent a word regarding his whereabouts. Besides living in a house devoid of light, she suffers from constant migraine. On top of it, she starts to have more trouble with her two sun-light allergic children: her son who is unusually jittery and her daughter who claims to be hearing a boy’s crying and seeing ghosts constantly questions her mother’s strict rules. Alone, without a husband, drenched in claustrophobic darkness, isolated without a telephone or a radio, and with two problematic children that she has to home school, Grace is at the verge of a nervous breakdown.

At first Grace doubts her daughter’s visions and calls her a liar, makes her read the Bible aloud in the hallway until she admits her sin. Later Grace continuously traumatizes her children with warnings of “Children’s Limbo” and eternal torment, until she starts to hear strange sounds and witnesses bizarre things happening in the house. If the new servants are not plotting anything against her, there must really be intruders in the house.

Creaking doors being opened mysteriously, unexpected footsteps, a piano playing, sounds of sobbing and distant screams heard from empty rooms are the essentials of an effective ghost story. Also, the children’s odd malady gives the director Alejandro Amenábar the opportunity to create an eerie mood. The simple device of keeping rooms dark and locked for the children’s survival turns out to be a great logical scare tactic. Similar to Stanley Kubric’s film The Shining (a terror-ridden story of a family of three, trapped in an isolated hotel, where father goes mad and starts killing), he makes perfect use of darkness and with unusual shots of shadowy rooms and empty corridors, making the audience feel more and more claustrophobic. The low-key atmosphere of menace and deliberately slow, tension-building pace are so strong that we almost feel what Grace feels, and begin to feel accustomed to shadows gradually enveloping us. Just like Grace, the audience feels the entrapment and the maximum terror rising. When she walks through the dark hallways, dressed in dark, long and uncomfortable 40s dresses (which are symbolically screaming her repression) she reminds us of post-war film stars. Her being named Grace and also her startling resemblance to young Grace Kelly combined with an outstanding performance in capturing Kelly’s icy instability and vulnerability cannot be thought as a mere coincidence. Also, the religious connotations of her name are well suited to her character and her pious defense against evil (real or imagined) and are suggestive of the plot development.

In making The Others, Amenabár, seems to have done his best in following the classical Hitchcockian style of horror film genre. Rejecting blood, gore and other computerized special effects, in favor of old-fashioned atmospherics and tension, he prefers to convey classical film techniques, like lack of light or dead silence, which play an equally important role in building the suspense. Here, the power of terror lies in the unseen, the unspoken, and the unheard. It is the dominant projection of the fears of our minds, the terror of our souls, recollected in horrors of the darkness and the unknown, and undoubtedly takes its roots from isolation and repression. At this point, it is hard to decide whether this is a ghost story or a psychological drama.

Stressing the same kinds of terrors of the mind, The Others seems to be a perfect allusion to Jack Clayton’s The Innocents – an adaptation of Henry James’ classical ghost story Turn of the Screw, in which Deborah Kerr in her role of a high-strung, obsessive governess Miss Giddens gets more and more paranoid about the ghosts and the existence of the evil, in the remote mansion, where she has to live and take care of two children. Just like Miss Giddens, Grace is a young, inexperienced mother who loves her children more than anything and cannot accept any evil presence in her house and she fights in every way to protect them. But, underneath her stern, bossy appearance there lays a very fragile woman who is raised as a Bible fundamentalist Catholic, trapped from the world, sexually repressed – she walks a line between cool self-control and madness and hysteria.

The Others is no doubt a stylistically well-controlled ghost story, with psychological overtones, and a rare example of the classical horror genre, distinguished from the lately released cheap scary movies, which cannot go further beyond being the parodies of the same genre.