The Others

A genuinely creepy tale which successfully resurrects the much-maligned haunted-house genre from the recent batterings inflicted on its good name (The Haunting, Mary Reilly) , The Others is all the more welcome as a genuine, straight-up, unironic horror movie, replete with fog, foreboding, much in the way of pitch darkness, and (at last!) not a self-referential bone in its body.

Kidman plays Grace, a religious young woman awaiting the return of her husband from World War II in their mansion in Jersey. Both of her children suffer from a rare light-sensitive condition which means that the house must be kept in a permanent state of darkness: as such, the doors are kept locked and the curtains drawn. If the lack of lighting wasn’t enough to generate the necessary atmosphere, the film’s opening knock on the door might do the trick.

Three servants – Mrs. Mills(Flanagan), Mr.Tuttle (Sykes) and Lydia (Cassidy) have emerged from the fog outside to apply for housekeeping positions. This is rather convenient, given the existing staff’s disappearance into aforementioned fog only the night before. However, it’s when Grace’s two children begin to insist that there’s another little boy in the home that things get seriously spooky, as said boy’s family have started to make an inordinate amount of noise, with many footsteps, piano recitals and banging about the place…

Formulaic and calculated as it no doubt is, The Others is nonetheless easily the single most effective nerve-shredder served up since the not dissimilar The Sixth Sense. I have spent years attending press shows without ever hearing anyone actually scream in the middle of a movie: this one managed it.

Director Alejandro Amenabar – whose disquieting previous feature Abre Los Ojos is now the subject of a Tom Cruise/Cameron Crowe remake – has coated the entire thing in a remarkably icy, point-of-no-return atmospheric sheen, with mist and darkness and silence all employed to maximum effect in the service of pure gnawing dread and suspense.

The result, if hardly a historic achievement, is one of the most seriously unsettling old-fashioned horror flicks in aeons. Not that there has been all that much by way of competition, but The Others has to be considered impressive by anyone’s standards.