The Others
I saw it in the theater when it first came out, but I wanted to watch it again and see if I could pick up any holes or slip-ups knowing the twist from the beginning. A few things don’t quite match up, primarily Mrs. Mills’s attitude, which doesn’t make much sense once you know what’s really going on. I mean, if they all died, what difference does it make when Grace figures that out? And where did the servants come from? Why didn’t they just…turn up in the house immediately following the suicide? It’s also not clear whether the allergic-to-sunlight part is actually something the children suffered from in life or whether that just constituted a bit of ghostly stage business so that they’d stay mostly in the dark. But that’s made up for by the return of the husband. When you know what he knows, and you see that deep sadness as he realizes that he can only see her because she’s dead, and then when he sees the children too…it’s very touching. Anyway, not all of it holds up, and the end is too much telling and not enough showing, but the atmosphere of the movie is still rigorously chilling. I’d seen it before, and I had my cats with me on the couch, and I still felt a creeping apprehension.
Tags: movies