The Others (Spanish: Los Otros) is a 2001 English-language Spanish gothic supernatural psychological horror film. It was written, directed, and scored by Alejandro Amenábar. It stars Nicole Kidman and Fionnula Flanagan.
The film won seven Goya Awards, including awards for Best Film and Best Director. This was the first English-language film ever to receive the Best Film Award at the Goyas (Spain's national film awards), without a single word of Spanish spoken in it. The Others was nominated for six Saturn Awards including Best Director and Best Writing for Amenábar and Best Performance by a Younger Actor for Alakina Mann, and won three: Best Horror Film, Best Actress for Kidman and Best Supporting Actress for Fionnula Flanagan. Kidman was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in Drama and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, with Amenábar being nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, a rare occurrence for a horror film.
Plot[]
In 1945, Grace Stewart resides in a remote country house in Jersey, a Channel Island formerly occupied by the Germans, with her two young children, Anne and Nicholas; both of whom suffer from a severe sensitivity to light. Because of this, Grace keeps the home darkened with heavy curtains. One day, Mrs. Bertha Mills, Edmund Tuttle, and the mute Lydia arrive, all seeking employment. Grace hires them as the housekeeper, gardener, and maid, and is pleased to learn the three worked in the same house years prior.
Anne claims to be regularly visited by a young boy named Victor, his parents, and an elderly blind woman. Grace believes this to be a fantasy, but after she begins hearing footsteps and disembodied voices herself, she orders the house to be searched, believing there are intruders inside. In a storage room, she finds a nineteenth-century photo album containing photographs of corpses. Mrs. Mills recounts that many left in 1891 due to an outbreak of tuberculosis. Grace begins to fear that there are supernatural entities in the house, but struggles to reconcile such things with her rigid Catholic faith.
At night, Grace witnesses a piano playing itself and becomes convinced that the house is haunted. She runs outside in search of the local priest to bless the house and instructs Tuttle to check the nearby cemetery to see if a family has been buried there. Tuttle covers gravestones on the grounds with leaves at the order of Mrs. Mills. In the woods, Grace runs into her husband Charles, whom she believed to have been killed in the war. Charles acts very distant during his short stay at the house, presumably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his service in the war.
One day, Grace checks on Anne playing. To her horror, she instead finds an old woman wearing her daughter's communion dress who speaks in Anne's voice. Grace attacks the old woman, only to find that she has inadvertently attacked her own daughter. Charles informs Grace he must return to the front, rejecting her insistence that the war is over.
The next morning, Charles departs, and Grace is horrified to find all of the curtains in the house have been removed, exposing Anne and Nicholas to the sunlight. She accuses the servants of doing this and expels them from the house. That night, the children discover that the headstones in the cemetery belong to the trio of servants, and flee when they see the servants approaching them. Grace finds a postmortem photograph of Mrs. Mills, Tuttle and Lydia, who all perished during a tuberculosis outbreak more than fifty years prior. Mrs. Mills tells Grace to talk to the "intruders".
Grace discovers that the elderly blind woman is in fact a medium holding a séance with Victor's parents, who have discovered via automatic writing that Grace, despondent after Charles died in the war, smothered her children with a pillow before committing suicide. Aghast, Grace realizes that "the others" in the house are the living family living in their house, and that like the servants, she, Anne, and Nicholas are ghosts.
Embracing her children, Grace admits to her act of murder–suicide: she had awoken afterward and believed that God had brought everyone back to life after the murder took place. Following the supernatural activity in the house caused by Grace and her children, Victor and his family move out. Anne and Nicholas realize they are no longer afflicted by the sunlight as they had been in life. The house goes up for sale again and Mrs. Mills informs the Stewarts that they will have to learn to cohabit with the living residents, only for Grace to ominously state that the house is only theirs.
Cast[]
- Nicole Kidman as Grace Stewart
- Fionnula Flanagan as Bertha Mills
- Christopher Eccleston as Charles Stewart
- Alakina Mann as Anne Stewart
- James Bentley as Nicholas Stewart
- Alexander Vince as Victor
- Eric Sykes as Edmund Tuttle
- Elaine Cassidy as Lydia
- Keith Allen as Mr. Marlish
- Renée Asherson as the Old Lady
- Michelle Fairley as Mrs. Marlish
- Gordon Reid as Assistant