Los otros

Last year, Nicole Kidman was given one of those lifetime achievement awards, I think from the AFI -- I have to admit to not following the lifetime achievement awards very closely. Anyway, it was an opportunity for TCM to run a couple of nights of her movies, which allowed me the chance to record some I hadn't seen before. Previously I blogged about The Hours; now it's time to blog about The Others.

The action is set in 1945 on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands which are a British dependancy. But the Channel Islands had been occupied by the Nazis during the war, and also subject to bombing. Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) lives there with her two young children, Nicholas and Anne, who have special needs because they have a disease that leaves them extremely sensitive to light in general and sunlight in particular. Grace's husband escaped Jersey and went off to fight in the war, with Grace thinking he was killed in action.

As the movie, three people show up at the house, presumably answering an ad Grace had placed looking for servants. They look like they could be a family but aren't; consisting of Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) a maid/governess, Mr. Tuttle (Eric Sykes) the governor, and mute cook Lydia (Elaine Cassidy). The three showed up surprisingly quickly and unannounced, which leaves Grace wondering. All sorts of visual cues also leave the viewer to suspect that these three may not be who or what they're claiming to be, and as the movie goes on animosity between the three of them and Grace grows.

Worse for Grace is that other things begin to occur. Little Anne claims to see people who should have long since been dead, which of course Grace knows Anne can't possibly have seen. But then there start to be various voices and sounds that Grace hears which can't possibly be real, culminating in a piano playing itself in a locked room. Perhaps the house has ghosts. But do ghosts actually exist?

Things get stranger when Grace finds a photo album which contains a bunch of photos of dead people (photographing the deceased lying in repose was apparently relatively common in the late 19th century), and then her husband returns from the war. Perhaps he wasn't really killed in the war; getting information to occupied Jersey wouldn't have been so easy. Matters come to a head one morning when Grace finds all the curtains have been removed, putting her children in jeopardy once the sunlight comes in. Or perhaps the children don't really have a sensitivity to sunlight?

The Others is an intriguing little horror movie that doesn't always go where you might expect it to be going, and one that's definitely worth watching thanks to Kidman's acting as well as atmospheric cinematography, not on location but done in Spain.