The Oxygen Network recently went through a period of showing old Nicole Kidman movies, and I decided, since there wasn’t anything else on worth watching and I didn’t have anything any better to do with my spare time-why not? I caught two of them-Cold Mountain and The Others.
Both of them are worth your time, but this particular post is a review of The Others.
I’ll say from the outset, many people wrote this movie off from the beginning as nothing but a copy of a wildly successful earlier movie with a similar theme, despite the fact that the movie, and in particular its director, won some awards. Perhaps there is something to the criticism. Hollywood has a bad habit of latching on to successful formulas and making you sick of them. On the other hand, how many totally original movies can there be?
I’ll add one more point. I saw the other movie in question quite a while back and, in my opinion, this one is superior. The atmosphere is gloomier, the setting is more macabre, the acting is at least equal, and overall, the movie is scarier-especially the end of the movie, which is actually quite chilling. It will stay with you for a while and, to make sure I make myself clear-this is not a movie for the kiddies. I am very serious. I was disturbed by the end of this movie, and if you are one of the very few that read much of the first draft of the novel I published on this blog, you will know that it goes without saying that it takes a hell of a lot to disturb me.
This one did the trick.
That is not to say the movie is flawless-far from it. It requires quite a few leaps, in fact. What we are dealing with here is the spirit world, which of course always requires some suspension of disbelief and an acceptance of certain precepts in order for everything else to follow along a logical course from there.
The most obvious one is a requirement for belief in ghosts to begin with, of course. Going from there, you must make the equally obvious leap in a belief that the spirit world can interact, however tenuously, with the world of the living. This movie takes it a step further and requires a belief that that same spirit world exists in something very much like our own linear time, with mornings started rising from bed, going through the day-to-day routines, the preparing and eating of meals, the chores, the studying, the conversations, on through to the retiring for bed at night. That is the major problem here, but in this case, it is one not so easily dealt with.
Nicole Kidman plays the role of an apparently widowed mother raising two disabled children on the British island of Jersey immediately following the end of World War II. Her kids suffer from what she describes as a photo-sensitive allergy. They must avoid all kind of light but a mild candlelight, and in order to insure non-exposure to the sun, she must insure that every door of every room is immediately shit when going from one room to the other.
She has had many other profoundly serious problems. Her husband went off to the war, only recently concluded-but he never returned, his whereabouts unknown. While he was there, the Nazis invaded the little island, and she had to constantly guard against the very real possibility of them taking over her house during what brief interval they were on the island.
After the war ended, and it looked like her husband might yet never return, her servants inexplicably abandoned her, and she is in the desperate process of trying to hire replacements when three people arrive, claiming to have worked in the old, remote mansion years in the past. They are an old woman, an old man, and a young mute girl, whose lack of ability to communicate is explained by the old woman as a consequence of an earlier exposure to tuberculosis.
The old woman soon has something else to explain. How is it she and the other two just happened to come looking for work just when the woman and her kids needed it most, despite the fact that the advertisement was never delivered. She produced the undelivered advertisement. Taken aback, the old woman explained that she had always loved working at the residence, as had the other two, the former owners having treated them very well.
The mother agrees to let the three stay on, but over time, other mysterious events involving the unseen presence of a little boy named Victor cause her grave concern. No one seems to communicate with the alleged boy besides the daughter, who swears by his existence, alone with that of an adult man, woman, and an old woman who “smells bad”, the little girl going on to say she thinks the old woman in question is a witch. Yet, the little girl swears the people are not ghosts, explaining to her little brother that ghosts “wear sheets and rattle chains”.
The mother is angered at her daughter’s stories, all the more at her stubbornness at refusing to admit she is lying. She compels her to study the Bible even more than is her regular wont. Finally, the woman finds evidence of the “others” in the house. She hears voices, and once hears the playing of a piano, tracing the sound to an empty room, the piano silent and unattended. She closes the lid over the keyboard, and leaves, only to hear more voices and further playing. Returning to the room, she discovers the keyboard cover once again open.
Apologizing profusely to her daughter, she seeks an explanation from the old woman, who helps her search the house, an endeavor that turns up yet no sign of any other inhabitants, though it does reveal one possibly vital clue. She discovers a series of old pictures of various people, seemingly sleeping. The old woman explains to her that these are pictures taken of people immediately upon their deaths, something done at one point in time in order to keep the memories of the people alive.
Not too long after this, the little girl disappears, and the mother looks over the house for her. When she finally finds her in the room in which she sought out Victor, then dressing in what looks to be something like a white gown with a veil, the little girl appears transformed into an old woman, chanting some strange ditty while dangling something that looks like a puppet on a string. Horrified, the mother demands the creature tell her what she has done to her daughter, only to hear an otherworldly voice exclaim to her that she is her daughter. The woman grabs the little girl by the throat and almost strangles the life out of her, though regaining control of herself just in time.
She determines to take it on herself to travel to the village and bring back the Vicar of the Church in order to bless the house, despite the fact that the Vicar has seemingly ignored her earlier requests to come to the home. She sets off through the woods while telling the old man, who has settled into his position as gardener, to find what graves might have been disturbed that might account for the bizarre occurrences. As she walks on, we see the old woman telling the old man to cover the graves, which he does, with piles of dead leaves, while wondering whether they should try to stop the woman from walking to the town.
“The fog will stop her,” the old woman reminds him.
“Oh, yes, of course,” the old man replies. “The fog.”
As the mother proceeds through the woods as nightfall approaches, she is indeed met by an increasingly dense fog, which soon obscures her vision, its failure to dissipate with her movements leaving her stymied as to how to proceed. Suddenly, at one point, the fog does dissipate upon the approach of a masculine figure dressed in a military uniform, which the woman recognizes, both to her surprise and her delight, as her long missing husband. She falls into his arms in a mixture of joy and unbridled relief.
“I bleed sometimes,” he tells her strangely, which elicits a winsome smile from the woman as she proceeds to walk with him back to the house, passing up the old man and woman along the way, as they remark quietly to themselves, concerning the man, that he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on.
The son and daughter are overjoyed to see their father, and rush to his arms. He speaks to them, has dinner with them, and seems ready to resume the old life, but the little girl tells the father of what her mother had done to her. From that point on, the man stays in his bed, lying on his side, his eyes open and his face a terrible expression of confusion and grief. Assuming that he has trouble with his memories of the front, the mother tells him he must pull himself out of his despair. They go to bed that next night, whereupon he reaches over and embraces his wife.
Later, he tells her he must return to the front, a bit of news that leaves her dumbfounded and outraged.
“The war is over,” she insists.
“The war is not over,” he informs her. He leaves, whereupon the woman falls into a state of despair that is only broken when one day, to her horror, she discovers every single curtain removed from ever window, the entire house now flooded with the light of the sun so poisonous to her two allergy afflicted children. She rushes them from one room to another until she finds something with which to cover them.
She demands an explanation from the three servants, whereupon the old man offers that the light is a good thing. Incensed, she demands all three of them leave the house and never return, at one point even threatening them at gunpoint.
Later that night, the little girl informs her brother that she has put up with enough of this, and climbs out her window, and down to the ground below. At her urgings, her little brother follows her. They have not made it far, however, before they see the three servants heading their way. Happy to see them again, the little boy waits as the girl, having now discovered the graves uncovered of their leaves by the wind, warns the little boy to run, that the three are ghosts. At first, he is confused. After all, neither of them wears sheets and rattles chains, but she finally prevails on him to run.
Meanwhile, desperate for some clue, the mother looks inside the room of the former servants where she finds, hidden under a bed, an old picture of the three servants-taken of their corpses, after their deaths. She runs in a horror, all the more so when she discovers the children have left the house, when she sees the three servants standing at the front door. She commands them to stay outside, which they do.
Suddenly, the daughter appears at the top of the stairs, telling her to come to a certain room. She follows her, desperate to save her and her son, and so she goes into the room, and-
That’s when she finally sees them-“The Others”.
Who are they? Are they evil, vengeful spirits? Are they demonic entities? Are they something worse-much, much worse?
I’m not about to give the answer away. I’ll just say it’s worth your time and, on the off chance you haven’t figured out the mystery of the Others-there are clues as to their identity, but you have to watch for them-be warned:
It will FUCK YOU UP!!
