FILM REVIEW - THE OTHERS

This film deserves a lot of praise, especially for Nicole Kidman's brilliant performance and for Eric Sykes for not being dead yet as I thought he'd gone years ago, and he
is also very good, in fact rather creepy in this very traditional, but
quite well subverted ghost story - there are no gory special effects at all
here, and none of the pitched hysteria and fancy hand held camera stuff of
Blair Witch - the result is a slow escalating sense of unnerving genuinely scary dread.
    Kidman is a war widow living in a large Victorian house on Jersey
in a film set soon after the War has ended and the Germans have gone, her
children are sadly photosensitive and allergic to sunlight. Kidman has a
complex regime of locked doors and curtains pulled to light rooms where
the children are kept only in candle flame, three servants arrive at the house
to help run this claustrophobic regime, this surprises Kidman as she
hasn't yet advertised the fact that the posts are vacant - her previous servants having left without goodbyes or collecting their wages sometime before. The new set claim to have come on spec at such an unfortunate time, but it soon becomes obvious they know more than they let on - then the children start claiming to have seen ghosts - a claim that
Kidman tries to dismiss with Biblical references to a limbo for lying
children, etc - but soon she also senses presences - and after a while
she tries to go to the town priest for help, but the fog keeps her lost
until she bangs into a man she believes may be her husband, (Christopher Ecclestone) not dead after all, and takes him home ... as the servants smile and Sykes says "Oh yes, the
fog.... he he he," and hides the gravestones he has accidentally exposed in the
garden, " after that things get very strange and spooky with some very strong twists, and nerve shredding tension - very Henry James in some ways and very beautifully done.