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Mainstream critics had some minor gripes, but seemed sufficiently spooked. Mr. Showbiz's Kevin Maynard recommends that you "bring a sweater to The Others—even though it's the middle of summer, you'll still feel the chill. Lifting a page from the Henry James classic The Turn of the Screw, Amenábar 's first English-language effort is a nifty nail-biter, all bumps in the night and Freudian female hysteria." Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman reports that "the movie has a busy, throttling intensity that takes off from the elegant fury of Kidman, her hair styled into a chaste postwar curl that gives her the aura of a Grace Kelly suffering from repressed hysteria. The character's name is, in fact, Grace." Gleiberman is impressed, but complains of too many clichés: "The gimmicks, in the end, are too arbitrary to tie together in a memorably haunting fashion, though they do culminate in a Big Twist, a nifty one that almost—but not quite—makes you want to see the movie again."

Roger Ebert of the The Chicago Sun-Times writes, "Amenábar has the patience to create a languorous, dreamy atmosphere. But in drawing out his effects, [he] is a little too confident that style can substitute for substance. As our suspense was supposed to be building, our impatience was outstripping it." While David Denby of The New Yorker admits that the film becomes "monotonous" near the end, he praises the director's distinct gifts: "Amenábar … works by suggestion much of the time; he favors ambiguity over outright horror. I have limited patience for movies in which beautiful women run around big houses in a state of terror, but The Others is extremely skillful. There's nothing cheap in it, as there was in What Lies Beneath, where the real problem was what lay behind—the heroine kept backing into things."

I have often heard Christians condemn ghost stories like The Others and The Sixth Sense due to their warped portrayals of the afterlife described in Scripture. This is a rash and unfortunate judgment. It's true, some spooky movies exist merely to trouble us or even damage us. But there is a long tradition of ghost stories that make little or no claim to realism; they are metaphor-heavy fairy tales, in which the ghosts are clearly fictions invented to serve the story and provoke questions about true phenomena. They might warn us that the past can return to haunt us if we have not acted responsibly. They can exhort us to respect the memory of the departed. The Sixth Sense had something to say about facing your fears, and about how we tend to run from the very people we should be listening to and helping out. Surely you have a "ghost" or two, someone or something that you have lost or left behind who returns to your thoughts from time to time. What better way to explore the implications than with some playful and imaginative fiction?

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August (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45