The Others
Nicole Kidman and James Bentley
Watching Alejandro Amenábar's The Others for a second time is like watching a new film. Being a party to the secret of the haunting that plagues Grace's family directs our attention to nuances previously unseen. If only the children in this story had a therapist along to help them. Does Malcolm Crowe have any openings?
On this second viewing, I wondered how much Anne remembered from the attack when her mother "went mad," as she called it. Did she remember being hurt or killed? Or was her mother's aggression the only memory that stayed with her? I'm thinking the latter since, in the end, Grace reveals that the children began playing with the pillows on the bed. Presumably, that includes the pillow that she used to smother them.
I admire Anne. She was so brave in her defiance of her mother's demand that she must subjugate her truth to fit mom's version. At this moment, Bertha becomes the ghostly therapist by reassuring Anne that soon Grace will come to see things as they truly are.
A re-watch of the film recasts Grace as a darker version of the brittle, rigid mother we think we see fully the first time around. Grace is much farther gone. I appreciate Kidman's performance and Amenábar's direction in giving us a character we can see two ways. First, as a high-strung, God-fearing woman who is frightened by the responsibility of raising two special needs children as a single parent. A parent who goes overboard with criticism and punishment of her children. A woman who denies the evidence of her senses when it comes to the "haunting." The second time around, Grace's rigidity and excessive discipline become clear as signs of barely contained violent tendencies and guilt at the killing she doesn't yet remember. She is not the strong woman she appeared to be at first. Grace couldn't handle the burden of life alone with two children within the darkness that the closed curtains brought, and she cracked.
Grace's husband, Charles, is mysterious upon the film's first viewing and heartbreaking on the second. His eyes hold a desperate emptiness as his wife embraces him at the gate. He appears to have severe PTSD, and his leave-taking is as mysterious as his arrival. Upon watching the film again, the knowledge that he is dead renders his scenes even more poignant and devastating. They are a visitation, a spirit saying farewell to his family. Does he know he is dead? His awareness seems incomplete. "I must go back to the front," he wanly declares as unseen forces pull him back to haunt a different setting.
Another detail that only becomes apparent on second viewing is the reason why Grace awakens early in the film to find her previous servants have all run off in the the night. What fun to realize they haven't run off at all. Grace and her family have awoken in an alternate "ghost dimension", and the servants are alive, but elsewhere. The Others is the only film I can remember where the ghostly dimension is a complete world that sits on top of the human world, where you can sleep in your own bed and eat from your own spectral food stores. So how were the "others" able to dispose of the curtains? Presumably, they would have gotten rid of food from the previous residents, too. Maybe anything attached to the house itself is fair game.
I thought it was a letdown to tell, rather than show, the scene where Grace kills her children and shoots herself. Here The Sixth Sense was more powerful because it showed Malcom's death in a flashback. I wanted to see what provoked Grace into taking the lives of her family.
The Others makes creative use of POV to depict a woman's gradual awakening to the spirit realm. The frequent misdirection is outstanding, as when the servants advance on Grace near the end, sinister and impervious to bullets. We realize with delight that they are here to help, not to threaten. I love the way Bertha uses "ma'am" in the final scene with a cheeky expression-- she and Grace both know she doesn't have to address her that way anymore. But she chooses to remain in the role of the servant. Even spirits crave the comfort of following well-trodden social conventions.