THE OTHERS @ 25

Grace and her two children live in a mansion on Jersey. It's just past world war two and the Nazi occupiers have left but so have the servants of grace's mansion house. Three locals knock on the door and offer their domestic services and, after some confusion, are let in and start work. But there are restrictions. The windows of the rooms are to be curtained off at all times when the children are in them. The children are allergic to light. When one door is open, the other door must be locked. There are sounds of movement in the house when no one should be there to make them. Grace's daughter Anne claims she sees a boy her own age called Victor. The house is bound by fog.

This is a tale of whispers and shadows, of memory recorded and repressed. And it is a story of responsibility. But none of that is served up front. We need to take our time following Grace and her observations of what is happening in her house. We need to listen to the conversation between her children and observe all of their relations with the servants. We are going to be led on a strange journey which won't make sense until the end (beyond its twist) and then will probably stay unsettled in any thoughts you have of it afterwards.

The look of the piece is a kind of magic hour gothic with deep black shadows and golden tones. The score is spare and quite conventional with slight screeching strings stabbing and discordant swells for momentum. But this feels appropriate. There are no jump scares to warrant orchestral explosions. This situation keeps things on a constantly uncertain balance.

Nicole Kidman as Grace gives us a parent on continuous alert. The order she seeks in the running of the day to day keeps dismantling delicately. She doubts her children's claims of what they have seen but has nothing to replace the stories with. It's a strong, sustained performance which can break into operatic histrionics but mostly kept in uneasy restraint. An old acquaintance of mine who had acted in theatre told me that her director told her to imagine that a pearl necklace had broken and scattered around the room and that she should be constantly examining the carpet for the unrecovered gems. Kidman's turn is like that, she attends each sound and quirk of light, thinking it might contain the solution to mysteries. That she never allows this to stretch into viewer fatigue is testament.

The three servants are led by Irish veteran Fionnula Flannagan whose patience and concern boast a gravitas which can only be understood as the darker details appear. Comedy veteran Eric Sykes reels all of his lifetime career's phsyicality to a hulking silence. On silence, Elaine Cassady's mute Lydia is given the thankless task of recieving information she does not like but cannot convey. If they feel clumped there is a reason for that. The story must have them and have them like this.

I'm going to leave one performance out as mentioning it would constitute a spoiler and I want you to see this film. I'll go straight to the children, instead. Nicholas, the boy with the unearthly pallor, is constantly puzzled to the extent of his sleep being dependably uneven and his queries frustrated. His older sister Anne has a wicked cheek, happily taunting her brother's worries and feeding disinformation like a learned brat. But she is also witness to the shapes of the goings on and her accounts of them are true. When she shows her mother what the figures she has seen look like in her drawing, Grace must admit that it does not feel like a child's fabrication. Anne has dealings with the others, most memorably in a scene which breaks the ambiguity. She, herself, is not afraid but is to receive a shock (beautifully played in a double take) in good time. Alakina Mann and James Bentley give us upper crust kids who are resolutely in their childhood, even when it would have been more convenient for them to grow up a little to aid the narrative.

As I say, I will not spoil this one. It's recent enough to discover anew. In the several rewatches I've done of it, I have found fresh details that only deepen the horror of the situation. Like The Innocents or Dark Water, all good ghost stories should haunt us. This one does.

Viewing notes: I watched my local 4K of this and, most recently, introduced it to two friends who enjoyed it. The 4K is gorgeously renedered and supported by an effective 5.1 audio track. It is currently streaming with a subscription on Stan.