There are so many classic ghost stories and vintage fright films that work their way through the fabric of the new supernatural thriller The Others, it's almost impossible to list them all. Impossible and unnecessary, since The Others stands just fine on its own as a good old-fashioned spook story — creepy and quietly menacing in an elegant, understated fashion that hardly ever finds its way into horror movies any more. Besides, as far as comparisons and precedents go, all most audiences are going to want or need to know about this one can be communicated in three words: The Sixth Sense.
The Sixth Sense comparison isn't entirely fair — The Others is actually a much better film — but the two movies do share some major elements, not the least of which is an abiding fascination with the dark — that is, with the unseen (and sometimes seen) world of the dead. Oh yeah, and both movies contain a killer twist at the end.
One more thing shared with The Sixth Sense (and then I promise to let it go) is that The Others is a labor of love from one of those young international auteurs who seem to pop up and take Hollywood by storm every so often. By way of introduction, Alejandro Amenabar (who not only wrote and directed The Others but also composed the film's eerily effective score) is the hot new Spanish director whose remarkable, sci-fi-ish cult film Open Your Eyes is currently being remade as Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz. Amenabar also made a fascinating little thriller called Thesis (available stateside on DVD) and on the basis of those previous efforts and The Others, it doesn't seem like an overstatement to describe him as one of the most promising filmmakers currently working.
Tom Cruise serves as one of the producers on The Others, while his ex- (or soon-to-be-ex-) wife Nicole Kidman, stars. The film is a rare class act from Dimension Films, the Miramax "genre" picture off-shoot usually more concerned with blatant shocks and money shots — severed limbs, exposed breasts and Kevin Smith/Robert Rodriguez flicks — than with insinuating itself under our skin.
Deliciously claustrophobic in the extreme, The Others takes place almost entirely within the confines of a forbidding old home that, in the tradition of all the best haunted house flicks, becomes as much a character in the movie as anyone else. Kidman plays Grace, a high-strung widow with two small children, who both have a strange and potentially life-threatening allergy to sunlight. This causes Grace to creep about the house in near-total darkness, keeping a constant vigil to let in as little light as possible (a crucial metaphor and convenient plot point that gives Amenabar the opportunity to film everything in a ravishingly moody half-light).
It soon develops that the house may just have a ghost or two hanging about, information the movie doles out in a slow, sure manner that uses atmosphere, small details and deliberate pacing to throw us off balance and maximize tension. All the right elements are here — weeping and wailing from invisible entities in the night, inanimate objects that take on ominous life, creepy children, withered crones with weird eyes, inscrutable servants with terrible secrets. However, the real strength of the horror that The Others specializes in is almost purely psychological.
Much like the classic psychological ghost stories it echoes — The Haunting (the 1963 original, not the joke of a remake) and The Innocents (along with its Henry James source material, The Turn of the Screw) — The Others creates a sense of unreality that encourages us to share the mounting disorientation of its characters and to doubt their very perceptions. There's no such thing as a reliable (or maybe even sane) narrator here or in any of those aforementioned films, so we're constantly invited to wonder whether what we're "seeing" is supernatural in origin or merely an extension of someone's overactive or unbalanced imagination. In the ultimate playing out of this bugaboo, Kidman's increasingly loopy character whisks off the sheets covering a roomful of objects from which she thinks she hears ghostly whispering — only to discover a mannequin, a coat rack and, finally, a mirror reflecting her own agitated image back at her.
From the vampiric, sunlight allergy of Grace's kids, right on down the line, The Others seems to take place almost exclusively in a nebulous realm between the dead and the living, an undead zone where it's difficult to tell flesh and blood from figments or phantasms. That's the real pleasure and, ultimately, the strength of Amenabar's film.
The movie plays too many of its really good cards just a little bit early and you could make a case that the love-it-or-hate-it twist ending destroys much of the film's carefully cultivated ambiguity, but The Others succeeds despite these missteps. By the end of the film, there isn't a single character that doesn't inspire our fear, pity and a sense of overwhelming unease. It's as if the old dark house-cum-prison at the center of The Others has consumed the entire world, or at least all the light in it, leaving us all alone in the dark with only the dubious comfort of Sartre's definition of Hell as other people.
Even though it was written in 1981, three full years before Glengarry Glen Ross, there's reason to think of David Mamet's Lakeboat as Glengarry at sea. Mamet's play, and now actor Joe Mantegna's directorial debut, shoves us head first into another deeply insular man's world, this one located on a steel freighter making its way up the Great Lakes to Canada. All of the tough-talking males in this world use the word fuck "in direct proportion to how bored they are" and women are exclusively defined as "soft things with a hole in the center." For the record, there are only two females in the entire film, both seen in fantasy segments: one gets fucked and the other fucks someone over.
Early, unrefined Mamet, and all the more interesting for it, Lakeboat unfolds as a series of barely connected vignettes in which the characters sit around drinking, playing cards, reading girly mags, and, mostly, talking. The language is pure Mamet — terse, eloquent, profane and often surprisingly witty — and typical conversations revolve around hypothetical battles between Steven Seagal and Jerry Lewis, or a guy who ate a chair — just because no one stopped him. The film remains very close to its stagebound origins, and almost all of the dialogue in Lakeboat actually takes the form of monologues: One guy rattles on about drinking, women, life, whatever, while another parrots key words or stares ahead incredulously.
Mantegna, who also shows up briefly as an actor here, gives lots of respect to the actors and to Mamet's words, conjuring up some remarkable performances (particularly from Robert Forster and Charles Durning, the latter so enormous he looks about to explode). He ultimately calls undue attention to the fact that this is, at root, a play adapted for the screen. The static and intentionally flat shooting style creates some moments of sustained intimacy, but more often than not fails to take full advantage of the highly cinematic energy so rife in Mamet's material. Even so, Lakeboat manages to engage us throughout with its odd little stories-within-stories and crusty, eloquently ineloquent universe of testosterone and tall tales. It's all seen through the eyes of a fresh-faced, comparatively normal college kid — played by the writer's younger brother, Tony Mamet — a smart move that warms up and humanizes the movie's quirky appeal.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2001.