[6.8/10] I don’t know how much a good twist can elevate a competent but otherwise mild ghost story. The reveal that it is, in fact, Grace and her two children who are haunting this old manor, rather than being haunted within it, is a clever concept. It turns the audience’s expectations on their head, revealing that we’ve been seeing the macabre tale from the other side of the veil. In an era of movies that also featured *Fight Club* and *The Sixth Sense*, it joins in that procession with a reveal that makes us recontextualize everything we’ve seen up until that point.

The catch is that what we see up until that point isn’t especially compelling. *The Others* frankly might be more entertaining on rewatch, knowing what’s really going on and seeing how the film hints at its big reveal. Without the twist, it’s just a bog standard ghost story, in the vein of *The Innocents* and a dozen other haunted house tales before and after, without much in the way of novelty.

The basic premise, “What if we told a ghost story from the perspective of phantoms who don’t realize they’re dead,” is an intriguing one, but this movie only realizes the potential of that idea in hindsight, rendering the 90% of the runtime solid but unspectacular as an actual experience.

The movie centers on Grace, an anxious mother of two in the 1940s with bizarre rules for her children and wait staff alike. The children start reporting seeing and hearing “intruders,” and when Grace herself experiences these hauntings, it’s unclear whether spirits are afoot or if Grace’s sanity is slipping thanks to her isolation and the thought of her husband off at war. The question of What’s Really Going On:tm: is complicated by the trio of servants who are clearly keeping secrets of their own and occasionally speak in riddles or elliptical sentiments.

The problem is that much of this is fairly dull, dutifully running through the standard array of “something’s amiss in this creaky old house” beats, but rarely reaching the level of intrigue that the central idea promises. A good measure of that rests on star Nicole Kidman’s shoulders. She is far and away the center of the film, but not really up to the challenge of carrying it.

She overacts, stoops to indicating, and comes off as unconvincing in some key moments. Taken charitably, she may be going for a mannered performance in the vein of Deborah Kerr in *The Innocents*, but the exaggeration makes it harder to buy into the “ghosts or just insanity?” line the film seems to want to walk.

The other side of the coin is that the other two most prominent actors in the film do a superb job. Fionnula Flanagan does good work as Mrs. Mills, the head maid of the house, exuding a sense of both warmth and foreboding that neatly makes the viewer wonder exactly where she stands. Even more impressive is Alakina Mann as Grace’s daughter, Ann. The young actress conveys an intelligence, low-simmering frustration, and steadfastness that makes her a more than capable scene partner to her more experienced counterparts.

But even those performances do little to bolster the bulk of a movie that’s fairly light on scares. The few occasions where *The Others* goes for big frights -- Ann possessed by a seer, clomping intruders in a storage room, the servants looming in the distance -- they tend to be fine but not particularly unnerving. There’s decent meat and potatoes spook-work here, and little that’s actively bad, but little to truly make your skin crawl either.

Maybe I’m just jaded from seeing other films, released before and after this one, manage to exude that sense of something off you can’t quite put your finger on better than *The Others* manages to. This film seems to go for mood rather than outright scares, which is a choice that can be even more chilling than blood and guts when done right. But so much of this movie just plays as mild and staid, unable to achieve the level of suspenseful atmosphere necessary to make that tack truly succeed.

There are wisps of some interesting thematic material, though. While Kidman’s hit or miss at communicating these notions, *The Others* is, at base, a burrowing look into Grace’s psyche. It subtly centers on her sense of loss and abandonment with the suspicion that her husband was killed in a war she wishes he’d never left to fight. The most poetic and affecting moments of the film comes when she has to relive that loss in the afterlife, embracing him in this weigh station between planes and reckoning with her difficult emotions over losing him and his choice to leave again.

There’s also interesting notions of the afterlife at play, which blend with the aptly named Grace’s belief in God and a just world that are both tested by the grief and occupation she and her family have suffered. The film handles her resulting mental illness and grisly crime against her children tactfully and with empathy, adding emotional weight to the ultimate reveal beyond the simple “Whoa, that’s a neat twist” of it all.

There’s just not necessarily enough quality material in *The Others* to justify the ninety minutes or so it takes to get to that reveal. The direction is solid enough, with a few sequences like the storage room scenes in particular that are aided by some deft blocking and framing. The production design is more drab and flat than appropriately moody, but there’s a few neat lighting choices that help convey the low-burning horror. And the repeated symbolism of mirrors gives the movie something to rest on when hinting that our protagonists are on the other side.

But those hints,and the inability to put cards on the table, leave *The Others* spinning its wheels for much of the runtime. A good, slow-spun bit of moody horror can be incredible, but you need a depth of character and an expert construction of that mood on a scene-to-scene basis that just isn't present here. This movie is founded on a delightfully clever and spooky idea, but unlike the sprawling manor that provides its setting, doesn’t build much on that foundation.