The Others (2002, DVD)

Here's the rule about how to assess if a movie was a SCARY movie, or if the movie just made me jump a few times:

When you wake up in the middle of the night with the need to use the bathroom....can you just get up and go, or do you lie there in bed evaluating your moves. Wondering if you can make it till morning, measuring the steps from the bed to the nearest lightswitch...wondering exactly how to wake up your wife "accidentally" so there's someone to hold your hand...

All of this happened to me last night between about 4:00 and 4:31 a.m., when I finally mustered the courage to hop out of bed and book it for the bathroom. In the process, my wife "happened" to wake up, and said, "can't sleep?" and I said, "I'm SCARED!" and she said, "it's okay honey, I'm awake." And then I was fine and came back to bed and was okay.

This is what happened to me after seeing "The Others" last night, but I'm sure it goes back to that damnable scene from "The Sixth Sense" when Cole is trying to take a leak in his underpants, and that ghost kid walks by the door...we see him, but Cole doesn't.

Why do they put things like that in movies? Don't they know that people like me with overactive imaginations NEED their sleep? If I already believe in ghosts, and believe that some of them are really ticked off at me, what's not to be scared of?

The latest round of sleepless nights and scaredy-cat paranoia came from watching "The Others," a haunted-house movie that had the greatest movie audience scream I EVER remember seeing. Not just a "jump" that you get in so many movies, but a scream that had been building for an hour, and finally gets ripped out of the chests of EVERY member of the audience. This wasn't just the teenaged girls, but adults and grown men SCREAMED, and every person jumped about a foot out of their seats. Sometimes it pays to sit in the back of the theater.

The best ghost story movie since "The Sixth Sense," (and in parts even better...) "The Others" really goes back to the old school of ghost stories. A British woman "Grace" in 1945 is holed up in an enormous house on the island of Jersey with her two children, Nicholas and Anne.

Both children are photosensitive (i.e. allergic to light) to the point that any contact with the light will cause them to break out in a rash and start bleeding and eventually die. Grace's answer to this is to cover all of the windows in the home with heavy curtains, keeping all light out of the house (and keeping the movie incredibly dark, claustrophobic, and CREEPY). This constant threat of death looming just outside the house makes the threat of death INSIDE the house that much more horrible...there's no place for the children (and Grace) to run to.

There are ghosts all over the place in this house, but the director, Alejandro Amenabar, wisely eschews the route taken by many other recent "scary" flicks and doesn't use a lot of special effects...you don't SEE very much in this movie at all. He gives you a thump in the dark, and you use your own terrible imagination to figure out the rest. In this way, it reminded me of the classic "The Changeling," where you'd get hints of what happened in the house, but the terror is within you, not necessarily what's unfolding on the screen.

Nicole Kidman is wonderful as Grace, making two strong performances from her this year (the first was in Moulin Rouge), making some sort of record for her career. I don't normally like her, but this role was right up her alley. Surprisingly, since she's alone for the entire movie, with two kids...the whole Tom Cruise issue didn't ever cross my mind. I wonder if this is what her life is like every night now. Alone...with the two kids...ghosts chasing her through a dark cavernous house...naw, she probably goes out and parties. She's beautiful, but soooo tautly wound that she'll snap any minute--and that's BEFORE the ghosts start popping up. She's the sort of fanatically religious woman who tells her children stories of hellfire and damnation to get them to do their studies, and then punishes them with readings from the bible when they let her down.

The children also give fine performances in the film--and I don't like child actors easily. They're usually either too cutesy or too precocious for my taste, rarely coming across as REAL children. These kids are good, and your compassion for them living in that home, with their affliction, and with that uptight, too-religious mother is almost as great as your fear for the ghosts that are Right Behind Every Door.

The head servant for the house is played by Fionnula Flanagan, who was also a lead in "Waking Ned Devine," which is a hilarious Irish comedy that you really need to see. She's wonderful in this as the usually loving, but sometimes stern housekeeper who knows more about the house than Grace herself does.

This is an intelligent, provocative ghost story, acted well, directed with grace and subtlety, but with enough thrills and outright FRIGHTS to keep you going through the entire film. If you're a fan of being scared, or like to be cuddled into extinction by someone who does, then you need to see "The Others."