The Others
Rental and DVD rental
Dimension Films Cert 12
****
"Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin." That's the very old-fashioned start for this very old-fashioned ghost story from the thoroughly modern writer-director Alejandro Amenabar. After the extreme complexity of his last video release, Open Your Eyes (remade as Vanilla Sky), The Others has classic simplicity. It's also the polar opposite of star Nicole Kidman's last video, Moulin Rouge.
Set mainly in an old, dark house - literally, as Kidman's two children have an allergy to light - it has no bright colours and barely any special effects. This is a brave move in modern cinema: director Amenabar and his producers, Miramax and Tom Cruise, relied entirely on its actors and memorable cinematography to pull off an atmospheric, chilling tale - complete with a Hammer-style fog enveloping Kidman on a rare excursion from the house. They were rewarded with a UK film chart-topper.
What you remember afterwards is its sparse and colourless look - watching The Others is almost like spending 101 minutes in a sensory deprivation tank. But it's not boring. In its own austere way, it works against the odds, providing effectively jumpy moments, some Beetlejuice-style plot twists and consistently underplayed acting, especially by Kidman's servants, Fionnula Flanagan and Eric Sykes.
Kidman, who finds the servants she has advertised for on her doorstep, then discovers that the ad hasn't been placed yet, makes a surprisingly stern mother with a few lines you might find handy before bedtime: "Children go to purgatory if they tell lies."
The other plus is the location - it's nearly as important here as in The Shining. It's a remote house on a remote island in an area evacuated because of a TB outbreak. (In reality, it's Cantabria in Spain passing as Jersey.)
In an era when old dark house films have been played for camp hysteria (House on Haunted Hill and, especially, Jan de Bont's dreadful The Haunting), it's good to see that someone has the confidence to play it straight and the skill to pull it off, deftly mixing subtle with spooky. It's also notable that the first three films seen from wunderkind Amenabar, who also provides his own score, have all been both distinctive and distinctly different.
