Oct 222014
Judging by the excellent reviews The Others has gotten, I suspect I’m in the minority when it comes to my views on this movie. Fair warning, this review contains huge spoilers. I can’t properly discuss my feelings toward The Others without talking about plot twists and the ending.
So, spoilers ahead. Turn back now if you haven’t seen the movie yet and intend to.
All right, onto the review. My feelings through most of The Others were mixed. It had a lot of religious elements that I expected to go somewhere. I wondered if we were going into demon/exorcism territory, since there was such a strong focus on Catholicism. It didn’t. All it really did was work into the character development of the main character, Grace. I’ll get back to that in a little bit.
At first, I thought Grace would be my main complaint about the movie. I didn’t find her character very likable. In fact, in the early scenes, I questioned the movie’s description for making it sound like the servants were the creepy ones, because it seemed to me they were the normal ones suddenly stuck in an isolated house with this crazy lady.
Things changed, and my opinion changed with them.
Grace was clearly unstable and set in her ways (she tried to get into town to talk to the priest about her haunted house, failed, and then suddenly went back to not believing in the hauntings?), but my sympathy for her grew once the curtains were removed. Her dedication to protecting her children struck me, especially her anger when the servants suggested she expose the children to sunlight to see if they’d grown out of their illness. No, if the alternative to growing out of it is death, you don’t just try and see!
Overall, I liked the mood and atmosphere of the movie. It had a certain ambiguity that might have been better handled if we didn’t see the scenes of the two servants talking to one another about what was going on, but it still created a sense of uneasiness. I especially liked the fog, of course.
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| Welcome to Silent Hill? |
I never found the movie particularly scary, but it handled some creepy scenes very well. My absolute favorite was near the end, when Grace found the picture of the three servants–dead. The juxtaposition of that moment with Anne’s discovery of the gravestones and then the sudden appearance of the three behind Nicholas was brilliant. My opinion of the movie skyrocketed at that point, because it was just so well-executed.
And then it went on to ruin it.
From reading other reviews, I get the impression people generally liked the final twist. I didn’t. I hated it. And unlike Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, The Others wasn’t enjoyable enough to make me overlook the twist and still recommend it. Not only are the servants dead, but Grace and the two children are also dead. The incident no one wants to talk about is when she smothered them and then killed herself. The supposed ghosts disturbing them are actually the new owners of the house and a medium, trying to investigate the haunting.
It’s an interesting twist on the usual sort of ghost story, I’ll grant it that. I just didn’t like it.
For one thing, is it supposed to have an anti-religion message? Instead of religion being used to fight ghosts, the most religious character is the woman who went crazy (why is never fully explained), killed her children, and committed suicide. Once she learns the truth, she doubts her beliefs and says she doesn’t know if limbo exists. I really expected her to answer the question by saying they’re in limbo (which wouldn’t make sense, but it would have worked if Anne asked about purgatory instead), but instead she just says she doesn’t know it exists.
Why was religion such a focal point in the first place? It meant nothing to the overall plot. I actually expected it to play a role in the scene when Grace asked her husband why he fought in a war that had nothing to do with him instead of staying with them. I thought that was the perfect parallel to Anne saying that she would have denied Christ so the Romans wouldn’t kill her, and that the comparison would be brought up by someone in the movie. But no, it wasn’t.
To me, the religious stuff seemed to have no purpose but to be denied in the end. If anyone else has another explanation, please let me know.
But aside from the dubious role of religion, I just didn’t enjoy the twist. It took away from the impact the earlier (and much better) twist had and ended the movie on a dark, bittersweet note.
Also, why was it called The Others when the characters most often referred to them as “the intruders”?
I thought the same thing about the intruders! I still don’t understand that one.
I also looked for the religious aspect to come full circle at the end of the movie. It was almost heavy-handed at the beginning, but then it fell apart at the end when Grace says she doesn’t even know where they are. To me, it seems obvious: Limbo. I could even make an argument for Purgatory, since Purgatory is a place of cleansing of sins.
It would have been a much cooler moment if she said, “Here” when Anne asked where Limbo was.
My only idea for the heavy presence of religion in the film was for filler. If you took out all of the religious conversations and scenes, the movie would be a half hour long. It was set in a period before modern technology, and the kids couldn’t even go outside. They literally had nothing else to do/talk about. It’s not a good excuse or justification, but it’s all I got.
Yeah, that could be. I wish they could have worked it around to be more significant, though, even if its main purpose was filler. Sometimes “filler” can be reworked to be important! I added a subplot into my thesis novel outline just because it seemed to short, and that “subplot” ended up being the main plot. XD
The movie does revolve quite a bit around religion, but it isn’t anti-religion. It wasn’t made to preach or dismiss any religious beliefs, but to show how devout she was. Grace (Nicole Kidman) was left to raise her children as her husband went off to the war (WW2). If he had left at the start of the war, then that left her alone with her children for six years. If there’s anything that could bring a woman closer to her faith, it could very well be being a woman during that time with soldiers threatening to intrude upon her home, raising two children, and her husband off fighting for the country. What’s more is that her children couldn’t be exposed to sunlight for any length of time. So not only was she alone in such a large house, but she was alone in the dark. Whether religiously accurate or not, Limbo is often considered a place of darkness. So while the religious bits could have been left out, personally I think they helped set the mood (signs of the times, the unsettling Limbo-like darkness, the only “light” being God, etc). As to why she had gone “crazy”: if it hadn’t been explicitly stated, it was heavily implied that, when Grace received the news about her husband, she had cracked and killed her children and herself. Crazier things have happened, in reality. But after having been stuck in darkness for (probably) six years, and no longer with the hope of her husband returning, was it crazy?
That’s an interesting perspective. I agree that the religious elements helped with the mood and atmosphere. I just thought they should have had a bigger impact overall.