The Others
Nicole Kidman's role in The Others sounds like what her life would be
like if she weren't starring in films: alone in a big, isolated house with the
kids, waiting for her lost husband to come home, slowly going nuts. That alone
would make an intriguing movie, but there's a lot more. The time is just after
World War II, and the place is the Isle of Jersey, a British Channel Island
that had been occupied by the Nazis. Grace (Kidman) must tend to her children
Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), who suffer an ailment that
makes them light-sensitive so they must be kept in darkness, without her
soldier husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), who is MIA; what's more, the
servants disappear and then a trio of mysterious domestics show up at the door
to take their place . . . Enough, you say, but there are also
the Others, who make most of the preceding build-up seem irrelevant. Anne, it
seems, sees what might be dead people . . .
Chilean émigré director Alejandro Amenábar knows his way
around the uncanny (as we saw in his Open Your Eyes, which is being
remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky starring Tom Cruise, who also
produced this movie -- and you thought the ways of the afterlife were strange),
even when he's being derivative. Some shots terrify despite the obvious
borrowing -- say, from Don't Look Now. Too bad Amenábar didn't
take a tip from Henry James and just tighten the screws rather than nailing the
thing shut -- The Others comes to a dead end. At the Entertainment,
Holiday, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.
-- Peter Keough
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