This essay by Kate Siegel on her favorite horror movie is one of several contributed as part of Variety’s 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time package . Reality is subjective. If what I see as blue can be your red, what else is just perception? To keep a grip on sanity, we ignore that thought knocking at the back of our brains.
That spinning, mind-melting feeling that makes us question the very earth under our feet and leaves us changed forever. This is the bleeding heart at the center of “ The Others ” — a haunting, dread-filled waltz of a movie directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace, a woman who lives with her two photosensitive children on her darkened old family estate. We’re wrapped up in their family as they begin to believe their house is haunted, and then.
.. I won’t spoil one of my favorite cinematic twists of all time.
Rendered in the slowest smoldering burn by Amenábar (who also wrote and scored the movie to great effect), “The Others” moves from sepia-toned minimalism to tightly wound oppression as Grace watches her world (and what she thought was her reality) fall apart around her. One of the many things I love about Kidman’s performance in this movie is how she never falls into the traps of genre acting. It is an intensely vulnerable performance.
At every turn you believe she is a normal mother experiencing extraordinary events. That humanism makes the film’s creeping discomfort even more effective. It’s a film .
