[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Others.]
The Others is a movie you get to see for the first time twice. There’s the screening you see with its frightening twist still intact, and then there’s the rewatch when you realize that there’s so much more to the film than its reveal. Alejandro Amenábar’s English-language debut, a Gothic chiller headlined by a ferocious Nicole Kidman, turns 25 this month, and for a film released just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, it still reads as startlingly prescient. A quarter-century after The Others‘ tale of an overly protective mother going mad amid the fog of war, the world feels foggier than ever, the wars never seem to end, and the collective trauma of global catastrophe still hangs over us like a cloud of ghosts. The Others always gained new meaning once you understood what it was really saying, but now it feels like a haunting, near-prophetic peek into our own nightmarish limbo.
To understand how and why this all works, we first have to dispense with the twist, and look at the film’s subtleties once they’re exposed to the daylight of its third-act revelations. Grace Stewart (Kidman), parent to shut-in, photosensitive children Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), killed her son and daughter, then herself, after learning her husband (Christopher Eccleston) was killed in World War II. During the film, Grace has no memory of this recent murder-suicide, understanding only that she woke up one day and the servants she employed had simply vanished. So when a new trio of servants show up, led by the wise Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), Grace simply assumes they came in search of work, hires them, and gets on with her “life.”
Life at the Stewart mansion was already pretty strange to begin with. The family lives in Jersey, a small island off the coast of France that was occupied by the Nazis. Now it’s 1945, the war is over, and the Nazis have gone, but their fascist grinding down of the island is still quite present. Grace’s husband went off to war and hasn’t yet come back, the house has no power because the Nazis kept cutting it off, and many of the island’s inhabitants haven’t yet resettled. It’s a lonely existence, made lonelier by Anne and Nicholas’ medical condition. They can’t go out in the sunlight, or even deal with open windows, because, we’re told, their skin will break out in blisters. The Stewart house is a place of closed curtains, lantern and candlelight, and perpetually shut doors. When Mrs. Mills and her fellow servants arrive, Grace explains that doors must not only remain shut, but locked. It’s her way of containing her children to protect them from the light, and it’s not a particularly subtle metaphor. Whether because of the Nazis or her children’s illness or her husband’s absence, Grace has deliberately closed off her life, physically and intellectually.
The Stewart children’s education, such as it is, consists of little beyond Bible stories, and their mother’s interpretation of those stories. When strange things start happening around the house, and Mrs. Mills tries to gently suggest that the borders between the worlds of the living and the dead might be fraying, Grace confidently declares that “The Lord would never allow such an aberration.” Just as there is structure to her physical world, so too is there structure to the afterlife. She’s so adamant about this that her children, particularly Anne with her morbid fascinations, have memorized the different levels of the afterlife, including limbo, heaven, and hell. Mrs. Mills, playing the role of a gentle psychopomp trying to get Grace to see the reality of her situation, can only say that “There isn’t always an answer for everything.”
But Grace cannot abide mystery, particularly as Anne starts to tell stories about seeing a little boy named Victor around the house, as doors come unlocked, and as piano music from another room drifts inexplicably through the halls. Kidman plays a woman so rigid in her way of doing things that at one point she instructs her daughter to “stop breathing” because she doesn’t like the sound of it, who forces Anne to stand on the stairs and read the Bible aloud for days as punishment, and who pushes away any suggestion that her husband might actually be dead. She’s not a villain but a stern, rigid, incurious force for literal and figurative darkness in the lives of her children. She plays Grace like a coiled spring just beneath a wooden lid, ready to burst free of her prison at any moment but terrified of what lies beyond this ornate box of her own making. Even when things are going well, she seems constantly on the verge of tears, like an epiphany is just on the other side of one of her many carefully locked doors. It’s a masterful performance, and Amenábar makes it the centerpiece of his haunting cinematic island.
Together with cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, Amenábar keeps Kidman as his narrative focus, and builds his entire world around her. Light always arrives with a certain pallor to it, particularly when it comes in from the fog-shrouded grounds of the estate. The fog, which swirls in the garden and the woods beyond, is typical for an island community but, Grace comments, has never lasted quite so long. The sun never seems to break the clouds, and Amenábar’s score, with its timeless orchestral pulse, rarely climbs above its ambient lilt. It is cinematic limbo, rendered beautifully but claustrophobically despite the expanse of the house. Yet there’s something permeable about it. It’s not a wall, or a locked door, but a veil, and Amenábar invites both Grace and the viewer to peer through it many times before finally ripping it away.
All of this builds to that twist ending—Grace’s realization that every major character in the story, including her servants, has been dead the whole time—but on second viewing, that’s beside the point. When we know that we’re watching a dead woman trying and failing to grapple with the reality of her situation, it only gains more meaning.
When Grace’s husband gravely says “the war is not over,” he foreshadows not just the military industrial complex and American interventionism, but the feeling of being constantly bombarded by conflict in a 24-hour news cycle. The Others opens with Kidman screaming in bed. Twenty years later, it feels like most of us wake up the same way, reaching for the firehose of bad news lurking inside our phones and laptops and televisions. The U.S. has been at war, in one way or another, since a few months after The Others arrived in theaters. Pandemics have forced us inside, where we dealt with our own locked-door, closed curtain rituals and told ourselves stories, deranged or otherwise, to get through the long dark. We have all encountered Grace, a person so siloed off in a world of their own peculiar making that they simply cannot reckon with reality.
Watching The Others now, I can imagine a modern version, an off-the-grid family who’ve formed their own unique relationship with the church, until madness and loneliness overtakes them and the headlines of the murder-suicide leak out. More than, though, I can understand the feeling of living in a fog-shrouded enclosure, ornate yet lifeless, squinting through the gloom for answers in a world which provides none. The world is murky and slippery, and so we spend time draping our lives in veils and fog, hoping that the things we don’t dare admit trouble us will go away, or at least stay Out There.
The Others ends on a note of reconciliation, as Grace finally admits her crimes, reaffirms her love for her children, and accepts Mrs. Mills as her guide to whatever strange afterlife she’s arrived in. But to remind us what, and who, the film is really dealing with, the real ending of The Others arrives moments later when, clutching her children, Grace vows to never leave the house. Together with Anne and Nicholas, she chants “This house is ours” over and over, until the whispers echo through the house, filling it like sonic fog. Grace digs in her heels. The war is not over. The fog will never lift. The experiences of the last 25 years—war, pestilence, fear—have imprinted on the film and it makes the timeless story more frightening than ever.
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