The Others (2001 film)
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The Others is a 2001 psychological horror/suspense film by the Spanish/Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar, starring Nicole Kidman. In the United States, it was rated PG-13 for thematic elements and frightening moments and runs around 100 minutes.
Plot
Set in 1945, Grace Stewart occupies a remote country house in the Channel Islands and one day awakens from a harsh nightmare in the immediate aftermath of World War II. She lives with her two young children, Anne and Nicholas, who have an uncommon disease characterised by photosensitivity. Grace hires three new servants—the aging Mrs. Bertha Mills, elderly gardener Edmund Tuttle, and a mute girl named Lydia. Mills explains that she had previously worked in the house many years ago. Later, Anne tells Mills that "mummy went mad" after the previous servants left. Nicholas disagrees and argues that "nothing happened". Grace requests Mills not to trust everything that the children say.
When odd events occur at the house, Grace begins to fear there are unknown others present. Anne claims to have seen a group of people in the house several times: a man, woman, an old woman and a child called Victor, who have claimed that "the house is theirs". After Grace hears footsteps and unknown voices, she orders the house to be searched. Grace finds a 19th-century so-called "book of the dead", which is a photo album of mourning portrait photos of deceased family members, with some missing pages. Grace asks Mills about when she last worked in the house. Mills says that many were evacuated due to an outbreak of tuberculosis.
At night, Grace witnesses a piano playing itself and becomes convinced that the house may be haunted. Convinced that something unholy is in the house, Grace runs outside in search of the local priest to bless the house. Before leaving, Grace instructs Tuttle to check a small nearby cemetery to see if there was a family buried there who had a little boy named Victor. Tuttle covers the gravestones with fallen autumn leaves, under the orders of Mills, who comments that Grace thinks the house is haunted. Outside, Grace discovers her husband Charles, who she thought had been killed in the war. Charles greets his children after a long absence, but is distant during the short time he spends at the house.
Later, Grace has a vision of an elderly woman and attacks her. Grace soon learns that she has actually attacked Anne, who retreats to her father. Charles later asks Grace what happened "that day". Grace claims that she does not know but recalls that the servants left without giving notice and without her husband there, she could not leave the house and she did not know what came over her. Following Grace's attack, Anne tells Nicholas that Grace went mad in the same way that she did "that day". Nicholas denies recollection of that day. Charles says he must leave for the front even though Grace claims that the war is over. Charles weeps when Grace thinks that he wanted to leave her, and the two embrace then lie motionless together in bed. The next morning he is gone again.
The children wake up screaming as all the curtains have disappeared. Grace moves the children into a room and blocks out the light. Grace accuses the servants of removing the curtains and banishes them. After leaving, an annoyed Mills asks Tuttle to uncover the gravestones. That night, as Grace searches for the curtains, the children sneak outside and Anne discovers a graveyard and realises that these are the servants' graves from years past. Simultaneously, Grace finds a torn out photograph from the photo album of portraits of the dead, and is horrified to see it is of her three servants. The servants appear and try to speak to the children, who retreat. Grace locks out the servants and tells the children to hide upstairs in the bedroom. From outside, Mills reveals that the three servants died of tuberculosis more than 50 years ago and that the living and the dead should learn to live together. Hearing the children scream as they face the elderly woman, Mills tells Grace to go upstairs and talk to the intruders.
Grace discovers that the old woman, described by Anne as an intruder, is in fact acting as a medium in a séance with Victor's parents. The medium asks what happened to Anne and Nicholas. The children's answers are written down by the medium and read out by a man. It is revealed that Grace smothered the children to death with a pillow on the day she "went mad". The children scream that they are not dead. Grace, in denial, shakes the séance table and rips the medium's papers. Victor's family sees only the table shaking and the papers being ripped; they are convinced to vacate the house.
Grace, now largely realising herself as being the spirit which the séance tried to contact, regains her memories of the end of the war years: stricken with grief without her husband, and isolated alone with the children, Grace lost her mind and in psychosis killed her children. Realising what she had done, she then shot herself. Later, when she "awoke" and heard her children's laughter, she assumed God had granted her family a second chance at life. Grace questions whether they are now alive and Mills says that Lydia also wondered this before becoming mute. Similarly, it was only Charles' spirit that came to visit them before departing. Anne asks if they are in Limbo and Grace cannot answer with certainty.
Mills tells Grace that they will learn to get along with future intruders. The children, no longer photosensitive as they are deceased, can enjoy playing in the sunlight. Although the property is again put up for sale, Grace and the children continue to inhabit the house.
