Friday, October 4, 2013

October Horror 2013: 4 - The Others


This one was really good, not going to dance around that one at all and try to play the somewhat non-committal "Yeah, it was ok.  Nothing spectacular and nothing horrid" tone my writeups have been tending to take.  We got to the movie really late after getting home from Barrett's Haunted Mansion and a semi-interactive adventure called Zombie Apocalypse which was right down the street.  So we started the movie pretty low-volume hoping to not be too loud for anyone, which caused a problem because of just about everyone in the movie whispering almost the entire time.  The only major complaints I have are that everyone was whispering and that both Nicole Kidman's character and her daughter were kindof a bit of a bitch.  The daughter more often I think because she was pretty mean to her brother a lot of the time.

So the movie is set in England in the 1940's sometime after World War 2 and stars Nicole Kidman as Grace, a woman with 2 children alone in their large manor.  Grace's husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), had gone off to fight in the war on the side of England but has likely been killed.  A few weeks prior to the beginning of the story the house servants had suddenly left without informing Grace or collecting their final wages, leaving Grace alone in the house with her children Nicolas and Anne.

We open with the arrival of 3 people, led by a Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) who claim to be responding to a request for new house keepers to assist Grace in taking care of her children who suffer from extreme photosensitivity and require special treatment.  This treatment consists of a bizarrely ritualistic way of life in which all doors in the house are closed and locked before another door is opened, and all curtains must be closed in a room before allowing the children in.  Most of the light sources in the shots are implied to be leak from around the curtains (which is explained as the children being tolerant of a low level of light) and hand-held oil lanterns.  Grace claims that during the war the electrical power was continually being knocked out so the family just decided to leave it off and rely on natural fuel sources for light and heat.  I would add that, probably for practical reasons, a lot of the movie felt much brighter than it should have been for a house that is being deliberately darkened.  It's not bad and I stopped noticing quickly but it seems strange that this movie is better lit than Sinister, which took place in a house with electricity.

It's all a very interesting setup that lends a very oppressive and uncomfortable atmosphere.  I was initially taken aback by the adversarial posture that Grace takes a lot of them time but it really fit her character when I think about it.  She's effectively cut off from the nearby town by an oppressive fog, and the spooky happenings during the movie are spurring a belief in ghosts in her children that is clashing with her strong Roman Catholic faith.  The children, Anne particularly, feel like they're being treated unfairly (which they are, being punished for telling the truth of things but then being told to tell the truth) and begin to draw away from Grace and gravitating towards Mrs. Mills.  Grace then sees the new servant as a competitor for her daughter's affections and possibly even an active force driving a wedge between her and Anne, so she lashes out at the new servants.  It's all drama which I normally wouldn't care for since I did sign up for a horror movie but it's really well done as a backdrop to the things that go bump in the night.

There aren't actually a tremendous amount of explicit scare scenes in the film, they mostly just serve to ramp up the tension as Grace unravels and the servants are revealed to have their own agenda.  The character drama and the implication of things happening plays amazingly on the imagination and even though you're not really imagining ghouls and etc, there's a certain amount of feeling things are not quite right needed for the ending to work, which to me it did.  While the ending was not exactly something completely groundbreaking and new, it brought the movie together really tightly and paid off the excellent atmosphere building that had been going on.  Very spooky and focused.  I'm glad we finally got to this one.

Next up is The Shining from Stephen King week.

No comments: