When you have the attention of a Hollywood A-list star making a film is a whole lot easier. That’s exactly the position that Spanish writer – director Alejandro Amenabar found himself when his film ‘Open your Eyes’ was remade as Vanilla Sky in 2001 with Tom Cruise. For fun Amenabar had also written a script called ‘The House’ that had caught the attention of Miramax. Cruise was keen to see the script become a reality and it was developed with Nicole Kidman also expressing her interest in the film which had a strong female lead. At the time she was in the dying days of a marriage to Cruise but he was gracious enough to executive produce the film for her which she began work on immediately after Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge had wrapped with the film now retitled as The Others
Set in 1945, Grace (Kidman) and her two children wait for her husband’s return from the war, living an unusually isolated existence behind the locked doors and drawn curtains of a secluded mansion in Jersey. Three mysterious new servants arrive and it becomes chillingly clear that there is far more to this house than can be seen, and Grace finds herself in a terrifying fight to save her children and preserve her sanity.
Amenabar was only 28 years old when he shot the film and yet stuck by his guns to shoot the film In Spain with a Spanish crew resisting the pressures of Hollywood to tweak elements of the film and the film has a singular and distinctly European vision that perhaps would not have been afforded him if he had made it in the US. Kidman is great as the protective mother of her children increasingly driven to the edge by the spooky goings on in the house . The children are equally good as is Christopher Eccleston in a small role that only required him for a few days filming and yet there are moments with the children excited to see him return from the war that are emotionally charged both when he arrives and when he has to go back to the front to fight. Perhaps most unusually is the casting of legendary British comic, the late Eric Sykes as the groundsman and yet like so many of the greatest comedians he makes an equally excellent straight actor as he does here
The Others opened in the US at the tail end of the summer of 2001 and much was made of its ghost themed similarity to The Sixth Sense but nonetheless audiences lapped it up with its effective creepy moments balanced by the emotional core of a mother caring for her two young children and the film did huge business making $209m off a meagre $17m budget,
Now released on 4k Blu-ray the film has a number of bonus features:
New Looking Back At The Others
New The Music of The Others
A Look Inside The Others
Visual effects piece
Xeroderma Pigmentosum: What Is It?
An intimate look at director Alejandro Amenábar
Stills Gallery
Trailer
Several of these are EPK’s from the original release and the 4×3 format in a modern day widescreen era and is a little jarring but best is the Looking Back At The Others featurette with Kidman, Eccleston and director Amenadar talking openly and in depth about how the film came to the screen. The visual effects piece is also very good – its a short featurette but shows how visual effects can be used to enhance a film rather than drawing attention to themselves in the way that so many blockbusters do.
For fans of The Sixth Sense and The Changeling will enjoy The Others and even for those who have seen the film twenty years ago, The Others and this 4K version is well worth a revisit
Related feature : Nicole Kidman in the astonishing The Northman
Related feature : A Haunting in Venice special screening ….look who turns up to introduce the film!
Here’s The Others trailer……
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