The Others (DVD, 2002)

Finally, a ghost story of substance!

Grace (Kidman), the mother of two severely photophobic children, Anne and Nicolas, lives in an eerie isolated mansion just after WWII ends. It's quite a burden on a young and attractive mother to keep the sunlight out of every room her children pass through or stay in, let alone keep up a huge estate that she holds out hope for her war veteran husband to return to and keep with her.

After placing an ad in the newspaper for servants, three such servants arrive on the doorstep. When Grace answers the door, she believes they have come to answer the ad and to work for her. Instead, the trio are the former tenants of the mansion with alterior motives.

When Grace's little girl, Anne, keeps talking to what her extra-Catholic home-schooling mother believes is a child's fantasy playmate, Nicolas (who is the younger child) is scared beyond compare. Both children claim that there is another little boy living in the house. They can hardly be disbelieved by their spiritual mother because of the strange sounds in the house indicating something or someone is hiding and dwelling inside of their home.

The interesting point is that the nanny has no difficulty at all believing the children, and the three keep that secret from Grace. As in the classics "Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman, and "Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte," with Bette Davis, Nicole Kidman finds herself in a very similar sort of situation where inanimate objects become animated, voices haunt her, and she begins growing more and more skeptical of reality.

The film is a tension building, haunted house, ghost thriller. Though it is rated PG, I found it more suitable for an adult because this one could give smaller children nightmares. Kidman gives a first rate dramatic performance based upon nothing but her remarkable acting ability, and not her good looks! She is comparable to Bergman and Davis as an actor, that's why I previously mentioned both of them.