The Others (2001)
★★★ — The Others (2001)
The most M. Night Shyamalan film never actually made by M. Night Shyamalan. That's the quickest way I can think to describe The Others, and I mean it as something between a compliment and a caveat. Alejandro Amenábar has built something genuinely impressive here: a slow-burning, fog-drenched supernatural thriller set in a secluded Channel Islands manor in 1945, soaked in gothic atmosphere and the kind of dread that gets under your skin rather than jumping out at you. Whether it fully delivers on all that promise is where my feelings get a bit more complicated.
What Amenábar gets absolutely right is restraint. Heavy velvet curtains drawn tight against the light. The faint creak of floorboards in an empty hallway. Rooms that feel subtly wrong after you've left them. This is a house that breathes, and not in a comfortable way. The premise, a mother and her two light-sensitive children alone in a vast, mist-shrouded home that may not be quite as empty as it should be, is the kind of setup that does half the work on its own. You're on edge before anything has technically happened, which is exactly where a film like this needs you.
Nicole Kidman is doing something quietly remarkable in the lead. Her Grace is wound so tightly you're waiting for her to snap, her religious fervour and her maternal protectiveness wrapped around each other until you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. It's a performance pitched precisely right for the material: controlled, slightly brittle, and with something unhinged flickering just behind the eyes. She makes you believe in this woman's world completely, which is what the whole film rests on.
And yet. For all its chilling architecture, The Others is more unsettling than outright terrifying. If you come in expecting spectral grotesquery or any kind of visceral shock, you'll leave disappointed. The horror lives entirely in suggestion, in the pause before an answer, in the slow turn of a doorknob. It's a ghost story told with the solemnity of a period drama. Personally, as someone who doesn't have a great deal of patience for straightforward "ghost" horror (I find it often relies too heavily on things that go bump rather than ideas that genuinely disturb), the cerebral approach is almost a relief. The tension is real. But the terror stays at arm's length throughout, and I think that's a deliberate choice rather than a failure. It just means the film lands somewhere between haunting and inert depending on your temperament.
The pacing is occasionally a problem. There are stretches where the film mistakes stillness for suspense, and a few scenes that could have been trimmed without losing anything essential. The payoff, that big late revelation, is the kind of thing that will either crystallise everything beautifully or feel like a cheat depending on how you've been reading the film. I land somewhere in the middle: I appreciated it more than I felt it, if that makes sense.
It's worth saying that if atmosphere-first horror is your thing, there's a Spanish-language tradition of doing exactly this kind of work with enormous skill. I reviewed [REC] (2007) not long ago, and while that film sits at the complete opposite end of the horror spectrum in terms of pace and visceral impact, it shares with The Others a real confidence in its own internal logic, which is rarer than it should be.
As a piece of gothic filmmaking, The Others is beautifully mounted and impeccably acted. It respects its audience's intelligence, builds its world with genuine care, and never resorts to cheap tricks. Those are real virtues. It just never quite ascends to greatness, and I think it knows that about itself. There's a certain safety to it, a sense that Amenábar is always in control in a way that, paradoxically, keeps the film from ever feeling truly dangerous. More haunting than horrifying, and perhaps all the better for it.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2001 | Watched: 2026-03-30
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: STUDIOCANAL PRESENTS Apple TV Channel · Studiocanal Presents Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Philo · AMC Plus Apple TV channel · AMC+ Amazon Channel · AMC+
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Spain: Nightmare City (1980) · Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (2015) · Land Without Bread (1933) · [REC] (2007)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More mystery: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · One Way or Another (1975)
