The year is 2002. I’ve just graduated eighth grade, we spent the day at Great America theme park, and I am terribly sun burned on the bus ride home. The driver and one adult are awake; everyone else is very much asleep. Outside the windows, it’s pitch black. The bus smells like bus toilet, but I can’t get there because people are sleeping across the aisles. I am sun sick and motion sick. I am pretty sure I’m going to die.
After enduring back-to-back watches of The Sandlot, the chaperone has decided to reward herself by watching The Others. I have long since learned that adults want nothing to do with me when I’m feeling poorly at night, so I’m not sure she knows I’m also watching.
Isolated and ill among a sleeping crowd, The Others proceeded to traumatize me FOR LIFE.
There was a lot about The Others I couldn’t grasp as a dehydrated 13-year-old, but I recognized its quiet moodiness and unhingedly terrifying ghost moments. The little girl talking about Victor? Drawing the scary witch lady? All the curtains vanishing? The girl turNING INTO WITCH LADY? And then the kids hide in a wardrobe. “Stop breathing!”
The Others doesn’t get the same cultural recognition as Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, but it’s every bit as good, and it’s got similar elements: terrifying-to-me as a child, the twist, great kid actors, and a surprising emotionality.
Nicole Kidman’s character Grace is utterly unhinged, in an amazing way. I think this is my favorite performance from her. There is a tightly wound quality natural to Kidman that works with a mother struggling after the German occupation in Jersey. She is tending disabled children alone, with no hope for her husband’s return from the war. She looks like she’s made out of the most frail glass, about to shatter — although we later learn that already happened.
It’s not *really* a surprise to learn the Irish servants are ghosts the whole time. By the time we learn Grace and her family are also ghosts, you can kinda see it coming, too. But I think it would be hard to guess that Grace smothered her children in their sleep before turning the shotgun on herself. The signs are there. The daughter hints at it. It’s just so *horrible*, you don’t *want* it to be true.
As an adult, there are levels to the horror that I never could grasp before.
The husband stumbling out of the fog, confused, suggests that he is trapped in an eternal war. He chooses to return to the infinite battlefront (“sometimes I bleed”) rather than remain with the horrifying knowledge that his wife killed their babies.
The children are stuck with their mother who killed them. It’s hard to call their father cowardly considering where he died and where he is dead, but it’s a hell of a choice to leave one’s offspring with the woman who killed them. It’s not like she’s gotten more even-tempered in death. Then again, maybe he doesn’t have a choice.
I found myself disturbed to realize the Irish servants of the house are…servants in the afterlife? They died before the Irish War of Independence, but they’re still serving a psychotic English woman fifty years later, and presumably will be in this house together indefinitely, based on the last monologue from the Mrs. Mills. Is it any worse than children trapped with the parent who killed them, or a soldier who never leaves the battlefield? Probably not.
But it has disturbing implications for where the lot of them have ended up.
Grace’s family are Catholic — and I would love to hear the filmmaker discuss why they chose Catholic over Protestant, how this faith interrelates to the Irish servants. I think there must be some kind of social implication I am too 21st Century American to grasp. It’s possible they chose Catholicism because it’s just so darn punishing. Catholic concepts of sin and the afterlife are a running theme throughout The Others. I need to watch it a couple more times to guess at what they were saying, but I’m inclined to think it boils down to “they’re all in Hell.”
Even so, it’s got a reasonably happy ending. Grace’s family stays in the house. The children are no longer sick and can enjoy themselves in death. Grace remains isolated, her children are still trapped with her, and the servants are servants, but the tone is one of peace.
It’s a stunning horror movie. A few really terrifying moments overlay the kind of existential questions that can keep you up at night, bothered for hours. It works if you’re a frightened young teen who already knows adults aren’t safe, or if you’re a mom who’s questioned her sanity during the fever of lonely childcare. I personally prefer it to The Sixth Sense. But it’s great we can have both.
(image via Dimension Films)
