The Best Suspense Since The Sixth Sense

When I watched The Sixth Sense, it was under a bit of duress. I loathe horror movies, and that film was certainly marketed as one. But the person I was with was intrigued by it, and as there was no film playing at the moment that I particularly wanted to see, I went along with his suggestion, reassuring myself with the hope that a PG-13 movie featuring a young child could not be too scary. It was faulty logic, I know, but I needed something to cling to. The Sixth Sense wound up being one of my favorite movies. So when another friend proposed, a couple years later, that we see The Others, I let my recollection of that serendipitous movie viewing override my trepidation. And what do you know? It turned out The Others didn’t really qualify as a horror movie either. Suspense, yes. But when I watched it the second time around, I wasn’t frightened for a minute. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing.

In recent years, I have determined that Nicole Kidman is one of the finest actresses working at the moment. I first took note of her in the grossly underrated Far and Away (which I watched last night in honor of St. Patrick’s Day). Since then, I have seen her in many films, and her performance has rarely failed to impress me. Here, she plays Grace Stewart, a withdrawn, ultra-conservative British woman who retreats with her two children to the island of Jersey while her husband is away fighting World War II. She is extremely religious and determined to bring her children up with her ideals, though by the end she finds that she has considerably more questions than answers. When I watched the film with my uncle, it was this aspect of the movie with which he took issue. He enjoyed the film except for its religious implications.

Alakina Mann and James Bentley make their film debuts as Anne and Nicholas, the young Stewarts blighted with photosensitivity, a condition in which exposure light can be fatal. There’s something slightly unsettling about these children to begin with; we don’t see them at first, and I wondered at one point whether they actually existed or if they were the figment of a deranged Grace’s imagination or something even more sinister. But they soon work their charm on the audience. For me, they recalled Jane and Michael, the scalawags whose lives Mary Poppins arrived to improve. Anne possesses Jane’s precocious nature, while Nicholas, like Michael, is the innocent, slightly cowed little brother. You have to feel sorry for them, doomed to perpetual darkness and living under the shadow of a very strict and tightly wound mother.

Their lives take an interesting turn when three strangers arrive. Of these, the standout is Bertha Mills, a powerful maternal force played with stern gentleness by Fionnula Flanagan. She explains to Grace that she and her companions, an older gentleman named Edmund Tuttle (Erik Sykes) and a mute girl named Lydia (Elaine Cassidy), worked at the house before and would like to offer their housekeeping services. Mrs. Mills possesses a wide array of knowledge of the house and has a knack for keeping the sometimes unruly Anne in line. She also provides Grace with some much-needed adult companionship and tries to settle her nerves when odd things begin to happen throughout the house…

Dialogue-wise, this is a very quiet, understated movie. The speech is almost as sparse as the light filtering through the heavy curtains. The score is haunting and is responsible for the majority of the film’s truly suspenseful moments. The first time around, I spent a good deal of the movie holding my breath and shielding my eyes because the music seemed to be building toward a moment that I didn’t want to watch. But whenever I was most convinced that something scary was just around the bend, I found that my fears were unfounded. There were a couple of scenes that did make me jump, one largely because one of my companions let out a blood-curdling scream. I had a hunch that there was a major twist to be found somewhere in the film, but when it came it managed to creep up on me pretty unexpectedly.

The moody cinematography complements the other elements to make this a film similar to The Sixth Sense in its execution and heart. Grace is not as readily sympathetic as Mrs. Sear, and Anne and Nicholas together don’t quite match the impact of the haunted Cole. But setting aside those comparisons, The Others is an excellent and thought-provoking movie. The questions it raises may be troubling, but perhaps that makes them all the more worth exploring.