The film was theatrically released in the United States on August 10, 2001, by Dimension Films, and in Spain on September 7, 2001, by Warner Sogefilms. It was a major box-office success, grossing $210 million worldwide on a $17 million budget, and received positive reviews from critics, who praised Amenábar's screenplay and direction, as well as the atmosphere and performances of the cast (particularly Kidman). At the 16th Goya Awards, the film earned a leading fifteen nominations and won in eight categories, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. It was the first English-language film to be awarded Best Film at Spain's Goya Awards, without a single word of Spanish dialogue.
In 1945, Grace Stewart resides in a remote country house in Jersey, a Channel Island formerly occupied by the Germans, with her two young children, Anne and Nicholas; both of whom suffer from a severe sensitivity to light. Because of this, Grace keeps the home darkened with heavy curtains. One day, Mrs. Bertha Mills, Edmund Tuttle, and the mute Lydia arrive, all seeking employment. Grace hires them as the housekeeper, gardener, and maid, and is pleased to learn the three worked in the same house years prior.
Anne claims to be regularly visited by a young boy named Victor, his parents, and an elderly blind woman. Grace believes this to be a fantasy, but after she begins hearing footsteps and disembodied voices herself, she orders the house to be searched, believing there are intruders inside. In a storage room, she finds a nineteenth-century photo album containing photographs of corpses. Mrs. Mills recounts that many left in 1891 due to an outbreak of tuberculosis. Grace begins to fear that there are supernatural entities in the house, but struggles to reconcile such things with her rigid Catholic faith.
At night, Grace witnesses a piano playing itself and becomes convinced that the house is haunted. She runs outside in search of the local priest to bless the house and instructs Tuttle to check the nearby cemetery to see if a family has been buried there. Tuttle covers gravestones on the grounds with leaves at the order of Mrs. Mills. In the woods, Grace runs into her husband Charles, whom she believed to have been killed in the war. Charles acts very distant during his short stay at the house, presumably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his service in the war.
One day, Grace checks on Anne playing. To her horror, she instead finds an old woman wearing her daughter's communion dress who speaks in Anne's voice. Grace attacks the old woman, only to find that she has inadvertently attacked her own daughter. Charles informs Grace he must return to the front, rejecting her insistence that the war is over.
The next morning, Charles departs, and Grace is horrified to find all of the curtains in the house have been removed, exposing Anne and Nicholas to the sunlight. She accuses the servants of doing this and expels them from the house. That night, the children discover that the headstones in the cemetery belong to the trio of servants, and flee when they see the servants approaching them. Grace finds a postmortem photograph of Mrs. Mills, Tuttle and Lydia, who all perished during a tuberculosis outbreak more than fifty years prior. Mrs. Mills tells Grace to talk to the "intruders".
Grace discovers that the elderly blind woman is in fact a medium holding a séance with Victor's parents, who have discovered via automatic writing that Grace, despondent after Charles died in the war, smothered her children with a pillow before committing suicide. Aghast, Grace realizes that "the others" in the house are the living family living in their house, and that like the servants, she, Anne, and Nicholas are spirits haunting the house and causing the supernatural activity.
Embracing her children, Grace admits to her act of murder–suicide: she had awoken afterward and believed that God had brought everyone back to life after the murder took place. Following the supernatural activity in the house caused by Grace and her children, Victor and his family move out. Anne and Nicholas realize they are no longer afflicted by the sunlight as they had been in life. The house goes up for sale again and Mrs. Mills informs the Stewarts that they will have to learn to cohabit with the living residents, only for Grace to ominously state that the house is only theirs.
The Others was first released in the United States and Canada by Dimension Films, opening on August 10, 2001 in 1,678 theaters. It grossed $14 million its opening weekend, ranking fourth at the U.S. box office behind American Pie 2, Rush Hour 2 and The Princess Diaries.[8] It stayed in fourth place for three more weeks, expanding to more theaters. During the weekend of September 21 to 23, it was second at the box office, grossing $5 million in 2,801 theaters.[9] The film, which cost $17 million to produce, eventually grossed $96.5 million in the United States and Canada. It grossed $24 million in Spain, becoming the highest-grossing Spanish film of all time, beating the record set earlier that year by Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella.[10][11] It grossed $113.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $210 million.[6]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 84% of 172 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "The Others is a spooky thriller that reminds us that a movie doesn't need expensive special effects to be creepy."[12]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[13]
A. O. Scott of The New York Times stated, "The Others is a flawed if interesting vehicle. The anxious indeterminacy of the first section proves hard to sustain, and as Mr. Amenábar moves away from elegant minimalism, the story begins to become cluttered and confusing, rather than spare and enigmatic." Scott highlighted Kidman's performance, writing that she "embodies this unstable amalgam with a conviction that is in itself terrifying. The icy reserve that sometimes stands in the way of her expressive gifts here becomes the foundation of her most emotionally layered performance to date."[14]
Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars out of four, praising that "...Alejandro Amenábar has the patience to create a languorous, dreamy atmosphere, and Nicole Kidman succeeds in convincing us that she is a normal person in a disturbing situation and not just a standard-issue horror movie hysteric". However, he noted that "in drawing out his effects, Amenábar is a little too confident that style can substitute for substance".[15]
Neil Smith of the BBC awarded the film four out of five stars, writing: "Shot in oppressive sepia amid near-darkness (Grace's children having a rare ailment that precludes exposure to sunlight), Amenábar racks up the tension to unbearable levels."[16]Time Out praised the film as "confident and controlled... Absence makes the heart beat faster: the absence of light, the corporeal absence of loved ones. Shrewdly cast, Kidman is pitch perfect. It's a clammy, ingenious film, one of the best studio movies of the year."[17]
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times cited Kidman's performance as the film's greatest strength, writing that she "has thrown herself into her role as if it were Lady Macbeth on the London stage, with formidable results. Though Kidman doesn't hesitate to make Grace high-strung and as tightly wound as they come, she also projects vulnerability and courage when they're called for. It's an intense, involving performance, and it dominates and energizes a film that would be lost without it."[18]
Although the film deals primarily with the spiritual interaction of ghosts with each other rather than with living humans, William Skidelsky of The Observer has suggested that it was inspired by the 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw written by Henry James.[19]
In April 2020, Sentient Entertainment acquired the remake rights to The Others, with the company planning to revamp the film by setting it in the present day.[36] Later that year, it was announced that Universal Pictures will co-produce and distribute the film with Sentient.[37]
