Review: Atmospheric ‘The Others’ visits familiar territory

Geoff Carter

Friday, June 7, 2002 | 10:30 a.m.

Late in Norton Juster's wonderful book "The Phantom Tollbooth," the protagonist asks a giant, horrible bird if he's a demon. The bird replies with something to the effect of "I try to be, but really I'm more of a nuisance."

Such is the case with Alejandro Amenabar's slow-paced ghost story, "The Others" (Dimension Home Video, $29.99) -- it wants to be a profoundly terrifying animal, but it spends so much time stumbling around in the attic that you wonder if it needs help.

That isn't to say that it's not a good rental. The story of a splintered family living on a small British isle post-WWII, "The Others" is well-acted, atmospheric and elegant, if not terribly original. Grace (Nicole Kidman) is trying to raise two photosensitive children (Alakina Mann and James Bentley) on her own; the husband was declared missing in action and is presumed dead.

Grace hires three servants -- the kindly Bertha (Fionnula Flannagan), the elderly Tuttle (Eric Sykes) and the mute Lydia (Elaine Cassidy) -- to help run the house and keep the sunlight away from her children. "The light changes everything," Grace says -- one of many lines of dialogue that's supposed to be profound because it's spoken in a reverent half-whisper. Soon she has more than the light to worry about: The house shows indisputable signs of being haunted.

To tell you more would be to rob you of your rental fee, so I'll confine myself to the DVD's extras. A short documentary tells you how brilliant the film is, how brilliant Amenabar is, and how brilliant Kidman's performance is; the latter raves come from the film's executive producer Tom Cruise and Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir, whose appearance smacks as false as that of Kidman's former husband. Never figured the man for a schmooze. I wonder if he got a date out of it.

Two additional features fare only marginally better. A look at some of the film's process shots is nicely handled, as is a short documentary on Xeroderma Pigmentosum, the real-life rare medical condition the film's children are supposed to have. It's fair viewing, but hardly worthy of a two-disc set.

Amenabar is called a genius by his cast and producers (Cruise remade his "Open Your Eyes" as the dreadful "Vanilla Sky"), but I'm not at all sure we should be thrilled by the fact that he made a film that could have come out 50 years ago.

"The Others" is a good film, but it's the work of a copyist that didn't even attempt to build on what came before. He just found a ghost story at an estate sale, dusted it off and presented it as his own. That's not the work of a genius; that's the work of a dirty birdy.