‘The Others’ at 25 - One of the Most Overlooked Horror Masterpieces of the 2000s
25 years ago today, Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenabar’s English-language debut The Others arrived in theaters to eventually become one of the great underappreciated horror films of its era – a work of gothic atmosphere and genuine emotional devastation that has never quite received the cultural recognition it deserves, sitting in the considerable shadow cast by The Sixth Sense two years earlier, whose narrative architecture it can’t help but to echo. The comparison is not entirely unfair, but it is vastly incomplete.
The film, set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, follows Grace Stewart, played by Nicole Kidman in the same year in which she would be nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Moulin Rouge!, with a controlled intensity that makes her eventual unraveling feel inevitable in retrospect, as she raises her two children, Nicholas and Anne, in near-total isolation in a fog-bound English manor. The children suffer from a rare photosensitivity that requires the house to remain in perpetual, curtained darkness – a condition that gives Amenabar’s atmospheric control something concrete to organize itself around, with every doorway a potential catastrophe and every ray of light a threat. When the household’s servants vanish without explanation and are replaced by a new staff led by the enigmatic Mrs. Mills, played by Fionnula Flanagan with a warmth that never quite conceals something withheld, Grace’s already fragile grip on normalcy begins to fracture in earnest.
Written and directed by Amenabar, the film’s inspiration is unmistakably Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw and its 1961 film adaptation The Innocents – the tradition of the gothic ghost story in which the reliability of the maternal narrator is precisely the mystery the audience is meant to interrogate. Amenabar honors that tradition while building something genuinely his own on top of it, and the film’s structural achievement – the reveal that Grace, Nicholas, Anne, and the household staff are themselves the ghosts, that Grace smothered her own children in a psychotic break and has spent the film’s runtime unable to accept what she did – remains one of the more devastating pieces of narrative architecture in modern horror precisely because the film does not treat the revelation as a twist for its own sake. It treats it as an act of profound, aching empathy.
This is the quality that elevates The Others above the mechanics of its genre. Grace’s story is, stripped of its supernatural frame, the story of a mental health crisis with fatal consequences – a woman whose religious background, isolation, and untreated psychological unraveling led her to harm the children she loved most, and who then constructed, in death, an elaborate architecture of denial to avoid confronting what she had done. The film’s compassion toward Grace, even at her most terrifying, is remarkable. It does not absolve her. It does not condemn her either. It simply insists on understanding her, which is a far harder and more valuable thing for a horror film to attempt.
The film arrived in theaters on August 10, 2001, a month before the September 11th attacks would reshape American cultural consciousness in ways that extended even into how audiences related to grief, memorial, and images of loss. Watching The Others today, the scene in which Grace discovers a book of Victorian post-mortem photography and recoils from it as macabre carries an unintended resonance – a queasy foreshadowing of the wall-to-wall imagery of the missing and the dead that would soon become inescapable across the country.
The Others ended up winning the year’s Saturn Award for Best Horror Film and remains, to this day, one of the highest-grossing Spanish films ever produced, an achievement made more remarkable by the fact that it was Amenabar’s first English-language production after he had previously only made a pair of Spanish-language films. He would later go on to direct Agora (2009) and Regression (2015) before eventually returning to Spanish-language filmmaking, but none of his later productions have ever come close to matching the cultural or artistic weight of what he achieved with The Others. Nicole Kidman, reflecting on her career in a 2024 interview with The Observer, said:
“Actually the character I would love to go back to is the character in The Others, Grace. Because I feel like The Others gets overlooked and I loved that character.”
A rare moment of a major star publicly advocating for one of her own overlooked performances, and an entirely accurate observation. The Others is overlooked indeed, but 25 years later to the day, still not forgotten.
The Others is available for purchase on Blu-ray.