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"In an attempt to create something classier than the current run of ghoulishly violent, special-effects-driven horror movies, Chilean-born, Spanish-bred writer director Alejandro Amenábar takes the high road in "The Others", a haunted house yarn whose blood count consists of a single pinprick. His none-too-original screenplay blatantly purloins elements drawn from classic psychological chillers, notably "Gaslight", "The Innocents", the original "The Haunting", and "The Sixth Sense." The result is a creaky, exposition-heavy movie with a thuddingly derivative "surprise" ending bound to exasperate fans of the genre.
Nicole Kidman stars as Grace, a mother raising her two children in a huge, forbidding Victorian mansion on the Isle of Jersey during the final days of World War II. Awaiting her husbnd's return from the front, Grace attempts to protect young Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), who suffer from a rare ailment that makes them dangerously sensitive to daylight. Her task is complicated by an unsummoned trio of uncooperative servants who turn up in the film's opening scene to replace the regular staff, which has mysteriously departed. Wandering through the gloomy, heavily curtained manse, Grace hears strange sounds, voices, and music that lead her to believe that the house is possessed, a suspicion reinforced by Anne's claim that she is communicating with poltergeists who can roam freely through the locked rooms. A series of inexplicable events leads Grace to fear for her children's survival and drives her to the breaking point.
The turgid opening reels---"liesurely" would be too generous an adjective---presumably prepare us for a suspenseful climax. Amenábar's screenplay emphasizes the family's isolation. The masnion has no electricity, telephone, or radio. Each of its 50 rooms---which, Grace instructs the servants, must be locked before the next is opened---is accessible by one of 15 keys. She discovers fragments of the house's troubled history revealing that it has been the scene of grisly events. But the lengthy buildup fails to pay off, and the fade-out revelation, which will come as no surprise to moviegoers familiar with one of the most successful suspense movies in recent years, turns out to be a cheat, leaving numerous plot threads untied.
Some estimable talents have been squandered on "The Others". Cinematographer Javie Aguirresarobe's hazy photography of an English manor house lacated in Cantabrie, a city on Spain's Atlantic Coast, convincingly represents an Isle of Jersey mansion. Fionnula Flanagan, one of Ireland's finest actresses, gives an ambiguous, finely shaded performance as Mrs. Mills, the head servant, and Mann and Bentley, who have never acted before, are refreshingly unaffected as Grace's children. (Rosy-cheeked Mann, however, looks much too robust to be persuasively cast as a child shielded from sunlight.)
But Kidman's Great Lady performance is too chilly to inspire much empathy. Hodling in check the sensuality she exuded in "Dead Calm" and the wit that informed her work in "To Die For", Kidman presents a bloodless Grace who fails to engage us to share ther sense of dread. "The Others" was co-produced by Kidman's estranged husband, Tom Cruise (who stars in Cameron Crowe's forthcoming "Vanilla Sky", a remake of Amenábar's second feature, "Open Your Eyes"). Is "The Others" Cruise's remorseful star-vehicle atonement for dumping his wife, or is this limp snoozer a vindictive kiss-off designed to sabatoge her post-marital career?"
----Joel E. Siegel
©2001 Washington City Paper
used without permission
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