The Others: 23 years later, we’re still not over the final revelation of a film as brilliant as it is moving

Island of Jersey, 1945. In a huge isolated Victorian house, Grace raises her two children alone. They suffer from a strange illness, they cannot see the light of day. When the three new servants come to live with them, they have to follow a rule of life: the house must be constantly plunged into darkness, and no door must be opened until the previous one has been closed. However, the strict order established by Grace will confront the attackers…

For a first attempt, it was a masterstroke. In 2001, Spanish-Chilean director Alejandro Amenabar made his first film made in English: The Others. Combining his favorite themes of death, childhood, loneliness, illusion and acceptance, he brilliantly combined them with fantasy and gothic aesthetics, serving a work whose script was inspired by the films The Innocents (from the novel. turning the screw by Henry James) and The Devil’s House.

“If we are dead, where is the uncertainty?”

Cleverly weaving his effects in dribs and drabs into the horribly suffocating world around the increasingly neurotic Grace, it’s only in the last 30 minutes that Amenabar shows his cards.

The first revelation about the nature of the servants Grace hires is about the house and her children, who have actually been dead for 50 years. Then we think we’ve reached the possible climax of the film, and we even have a little head start on the rest of the plot.

Until Amenabar concludes the true nature of Grace and her two children and their absolutely tragic fate. Before, the audience identified with Grace, placed in the position of the victim, while the “others” seemed to be the Marlish family and this mysterious old woman who wanted to haunt the place like ghosts to drive out the attackers.

The supreme power of life over death

In fact, it is Grace and her two children who are the ghosts that haunt the house. Neurotic, unable to cope with the absence of her husband who died in the war, she killed her children before committing suicide in turn.

Deeply pious, defeated by the evil that consumes him, he finally found himself unable to protect them and condemned to wander with them in obscurity. This is because the Church has condemned suicide for a long time.

For him it was not a recognition of the superiority of life over death. Traditionally, suicides who were deprived of a religious ceremony were not buried in the holy place, but outside the cemetery.

In 2001 interviewAmenabar returned precisely to the crucial importance of religion in his film, treating his work as a reflection. “How Religion Gives Meaning to Death and the Concept of Destiny.” In one of the film’s final shots, Grace clings to the children and the house as if she were still alive, refusing to wander like a soul damned for committing a mortal sin.

The list of movies with memorable endings is already long. that othersA train of terrible, emotional charge, which split the stones in two, calmly climbs to the peaks.