The Others (film)
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| The Others | |
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 The Others film poster |
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| Directed by | Alejandro Amenábar |
| Produced by | Fernando Bovaira, José Luis Cuerda |
| Written by | Alejandro Amenábar |
| Starring | Nicole Kidman Christopher Eccleston Fionnula Flanagan |
| Distributed by |  Dimension Films |
| Release date(s) | 2 August 2001 |
| Running time | 104 minutes |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $17,000,000 USD |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Others is a 2001 psychological horror/suspense film by the Spanish/Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar, starring Nicole Kidman. In the United States, it was rated PG-13 for thematic elements and frightening moments and runs around 100 minutes.
It won eight Goya Awards including awards for Best Film and Best Director. This was the first film ever to receive the Best Film Award at the Goyas (Spain's national film awards) with not a single word of Spanish spoken in it.
Tagline: Sooner or later, they will find you.
Contents |
[edit] Opening
The film is set on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, in 1945, just after the end of the Nazi occupation in World War II. Grace Stewart, the wife of Charles Stewart (a soldier away at war, missing and presumed dead), fears for the safety of Anne and Nicholas, her children, who suffer from extreme photosensitivity, which means that if they are exposed to direct sunlight for too long, they could die. As the movie continues, the isolated house appears to be occupied by unseen (and possibly supernatural) "intruders".
Grace and her children obey a series of complex rules designed to prevent them from inadvertent exposure to sunlight. The new arrival of three servants at the house (an aging nanny, an elderly gardener, and a young mute girl) coincides with a number of odd events, and Grace begins to fear that they are not alone.
Anne draws pictures of four people — a man, a woman, a boy called Victor and a scary old woman — whom she says she has seen in the house. A piano plays when no one is in the locked room.
Grace is strict, and a Catholic who follows the Bible closely. She tries hunting down the "intruders" with a shotgun but cannot find them. She scolds her daughter for nonsense about ghosts until she hears them herself. Eventually convincing herself that something unholy is in the house, she runs out in the fog to get the local priest to bless the house.
Out in the forest, Grace loses herself in the heavy fog, but miraculously discovers Charles, wandering on his way home, and brings him back to the house. However, he is distant, lonely, and stunned when Anne makes allegations about things her mother did to her. After spending one night with Grace, Charles disappears again.
Meanwhile, the servants, led by the aging Bertha Mills, are clearly up to something of their own. The gardener buries three gravestones under autumn leaves, and Mrs. Mills listens faithfully to Anne's allegations against her mother.
After Charles leaves, and Anne continues to see things, including Victor's whole family, and a scary old woman. Grace breaks down to Mrs. Mills, who claims that "sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living". The two women also find and examine a 'book of the dead', which shows photographs taken in the 19th century of recently deceased corpses.
One morning, Grace wakes to the children's screams: all of the curtains in the house have been removed, and are missing. When the servants refuse to help look for them, Grace realizes that they are somehow involved. Hiding the children from the light, she banishes the servants from the house.
That night, Anne and Nicholas sneak out of the house and find the hidden graves. At the same time, Grace goes to the servants' quarters and finds a photograph from the book of the dead and is horrified to see that its of the three servants. Meanwhile, the children discover that the graves belonged to the servants. The servants, or rather ghosts of the servants, appear and give chase to the children, who make it back into the house just as Grace emerges to hold off the servants with a shotgun. The children run upstairs where they hide, but are found by the strange old woman.
Downstairs, the servants continue talking to Grace, telling her that they have to learn to live together. She begins to understand what they mean.
Upstairs, Anne and Nicholas discover the old woman is acting as a medium in a séance with Victor's parents. Judging from the clothes of Victor's parents, it seems that the actual time period is some time during the early 1950s. It is then that they learn the awful truth: the old woman is not the one who is a ghost; the ghosts are Anne, Nicholas and their mother. Grace loses her temper and supernaturally attacks the visitors. This sequence is quickly intercut with scenes from both Grace's viewpoint and the family's.
The truth is finally clear to Grace and the audience: She breaks down with the children and remembers what happened just before the arrival of their new servants; yearning for the company of her missing husband and increasingly frustrated by her children, she smothered them both with a pillow and then, realizing what she had done, shot herself. When she awoke, she assumed that God had granted her family a miracle.
Grace and the children realize that Charles is also dead, but he was not aware of this fact. The female servant is heard telling the gardner "I do not think he knows where he is".
Mrs. Mills appears and informs Grace that they will learn to get along, and sometimes they won't even notice the living people who inhabit their house.
Outside, Victor's family — less than happy with their haunted house — pack up and move out. From the window, Grace and her children watch as they drive away. Grace ends the film with the line that "no one can make us leave this house."
[edit] Box office
In opening week in the United States the film grossed $14,089,952, eventually grossing a total of $96,522,687. Outside the U.S. it grossed $113,424,350, bringing the world wide total to $209,947,037 [1].
[edit] Trivia
This film was #83 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments.
