Film - Philip Kerr on why you don't need special effects when you've got Nicole Kidman
The trouble with most Hollywood ghost stories is that they leave almost nothing to the imagination. Ever since Tobe Hooper went so spectacularly over the top with his geists in Poltergeist, film-makers have laboured under the misapprehension that the only way to scare audiences back into the cinema is with lots of special effects. Witness Jan de Bont's The Haunting, which was a travestied remake of the brilliantly atmospheric film of the same name by Robert Wise. De Bont's ghosts threw everything but the kitchen sink at his actors, quite literally, and the film succeeded only in making the likes of Hooper and Clive Barker appear subtle - no easy feat.
These days, thanks to computer-generated special effects, directors in search of ghosts, as is de Bont, can do more or less whatever they want; 40 years ago, directors were obliged to rely on good actors, a decent script and a bit of clever editing. But after the huge success of The Sixth Sense, Hollywood seems, once again, to have rediscovered subtlety and the Mercedes principle of making a film about ghosts: less is more.
Not that The Others is a Hollywood film; it was made by Spaniards, in Spain, and was merely co-produced by Hollywood in the shape of Tom Cruise. It's good, but I don't think it belongs alongside classics of the genre such as The Haunting (the Robert Wise version), The Innocents, Jacques Tourneur's Cat People or, for that matter, his Night of the Demon, which for my money is still the creepiest film ever made. Both The Haunting and Night of the Demon are films that I can watch again and again, which is not something I could say of The Others. But it is easily as good as The Sixth Sense, and in many ways, I preferred its less obvious shtick. I also had the feeling that I'd seen The Others before. Without giving too much away, I am almost certain that the plot is similar to that of Haunted (1995), based on a novel by our own James Herbert. But then, there is nothing new in cinema; there is only the cinema we haven't already seen.
It is 1945. Nicole Kidman, swiftly becoming as tiresomely ubiquitous as David Jason, plays Grace, a young woman with two children. In a cavernous Victorian mansion on the island of Jersey, she awaits the return of her husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), who is missing in action.
It's the kind of fog-bound house that has you reaching for a crucifix and a spare torch the minute you set foot through the creaking door. Not surprisingly, the previous servants have quit and when a strange trio of new help arrives, the apparently neurotic, not to say hysterical, Grace gives them a tour of the house that would have had me on the next bus to St Helier to look for a copy of The Lady, and a new situation. There is, Grace explains, no telephone and no electricity - none since the Germans left the island. What is more, her children, Anne and Nicholas, suffer from a photosensitive allergy that necessitates the exclusion of all sunlight. Even worse, all the doors must be locked, in case the children are accidentally exposed to light. Where better for a ghost story than a house in which the curtains remain drawn, and where the only light comes from oil lamps and candles?
The piano, Grace insists, must never be played - which means you just know someone is going to be playing a Chopin nocturne at midnight. (Incidentally, why is it that ghosts always play Chopin? Just once I would like to hear a ghost playing a Scott Joplin rag.)
As in The Innocents, based on the Henry James story The Turn of the Screw, these pale, strange children (excellently played by Alakina Mann and James Bentley) are seeing and hearing things that go bump in the night, long before the adults. At first, Grace is reluctant to believe in her children's frightening sightings of a little boy named Victor, but soon she begins to sense that there are indeed, as her daughter says solemnly, "others" in the house.
Kidman is well cast as the stern and neurotic Grace, and hers is an extremely effective performance. As the director, Alejandro Amenabar, explains: "What really drew me and captured me completely about Nicole was the undeniable force of her stare. Much of the terror created in the film takes place in Nicole's eyes. They are better than any special effects money can buy."
I can't disagree with that. And I was reminded very much of Deborah Kerr's outstanding performance in The Innocents. Here, as there, the eyes truly have it.
The Others (12) is on general release
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