The Others 2001
This is just a classic scary movie. It seems like it can scare you without even really trying. The movie opens with a screaming Nicole Kidman who has just woken from her own nightmare. A little later you get scared just when they play a few notes of music. I was ready to turn it off but figured, correctly, that it would be better to tough it out and find out what was behind the ghost story than stop part way and continue to be scared of the unknown.
They do a great job of setting us up. They pick the time around World War II on a foggy island in England in an old castle of a house. Only three people live in this huge house, a mother and her two creepy children who are light-sensitive, thus they have to keep the house dark all the time. Three weird housekeepers show up to help out even though the Help Wanted ad was never delivered to the paper.
I don’t know that it is a great movie, but it will keep your attention. I would put it on par with other well-done period scary movies like Johnny Depp’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The DVD makes good use of surround sound: in one scene the main character hears clumping around in the attic and this comes out of one of the surround speakers. I really thought someone was over in the corner of my room making that noise.
Nicole Kidman is very good as the scared mother of the two children. She conveys a lot of fear in her eyes and still looks great doing it. She’s not just a victim, she’s also very harsh towards her children and to the help. With a strong Christian upbringing she resists the idea of their being ghosts for as long as she can, but eventually must acknowledge that not everything can be explained by people playing tricks on her. It couldn’t have been easy to strike that balance between heroine and villain, but she is successful in making the audience dislike her, respect her, and feel sorry for her.
I’m not real crazy about movies whose intention is just to scare you, but if you like that kind of thing this is a good one. I’ll give it a B+.