Cast:
Nicole Kidman – Grace Stewart
Fionnula Flanagan – Mrs. Bertha Mills
Christopher Eccleston – Charles Stewart
Alakina Mann  – Anne Stewart
James Bentley  – Nicholas Stewart
Eric Sykes – Mr. Edmund Tuttle
The Others comes from Chilean-born, Spanish-based director Alejandro Amenabar, who previously obtained attention in the West with the striking Virtual Reality film Open Your Eyes (1997). (Alejandro Amenabar and Tom Cruise probably met during the making of Vanilla Sky (2001), the English-language remake of Open Your Eyes that Cruise appeared several months later in the same year).
The Others is a very remarkable film from more than just one viewpoint. In an era where you can only impress young horror fanatics with bucket-loads of blood and gross-out effects, Amenábar actually re-teaches his audience that fear is especially caused by suggestion and the absence of explicit images. The Others is the first intelligent horror film in years, completely relying on atmosphere and eerie set pieces. It’s such a relief to finally see a subtle film that is also effective!
The Others is an old-fashioned type ghost story. It uses a full flight of the genre’s tropes – the large, gloomy old English mansion setting, the sinister retainers, hidden secrets from the past, mysterious noises and happenings, and, an effect borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), a pathological over-sensitivity to light and noise. Like any good old-fashioned ghost story, Alejandro Amenabar takes his time in the buildup. There are no physical shocks almost right up to the end, rather it is the subtlety of doors and curtains opening when people’s backs are turned, noises in places they shouldn’t be.
Nicole Kidman lives in a remote mansion and waits, along with her 2 children, for WWII to be over. With the arrival of 3 servants, strange events star to occur in the old house and the daughter spots ‘intruders’ everywhere. The screenplay – by Amenábar himself – is not totally unique (filmfreaks who’re familiar with expressionism highlights from the 60′s will quickly guess the hidden plot twist) but it’s filled with ingenious findings and sublime dialogues. The Others reminds you of ‘The Innocents’ and there are far worse films to get compared with, if you ask me! What also is rather amazing about this production is that Amenábar seems so confident! This is his first giant Hollywood adventure with stars in the cast and American money and yet he has total control over everything. The acting is great, the plot actually scares you and the directing is solid. The Others is a total winner and easily one of the greatest genre-films of the last few decades.
The cinematography is innovative and brilliant, camera angles and the lighting set everything up so well. The lighting is very important as well, in fact, the subject of “light” is so well mixed into the story, the dark feels safer and more secure than the light does. There are times when you long for the darkness, just as the characters long for the darkness (due to a part of the plot including a health condition of the children, which serves a basis for the mental thrill fest to come). To finish off this concoction, try to listen to the score, because it’s very fitting. This is more of a drama than a thriller, though it deserves to be a thriller (it’s scary), but the power of it’s dramatic side comes bursting through. This is a beautiful movie, it has overtones of a more serious side, and it’s a movie that hardly belongs in the horror section because of it’s beauty, but it’s too darned eerie, weird, and chilling to fit anywhere else.