THE OTHERS

Nicole Kidman’s role in The Others sounds like what her life would be like if she weren’t starring in films: alone in a big, isolated house with the kids, waiting for her lost husband to come home, slowly going nuts. That alone would make an intriguing movie, but there’s a lot more. The time is just after World War II, and the place is the Isle of Jersey, a British Channel Island that had been occupied by the Nazis. Grace (Kidman) must tend to her children Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), who suffer an ailment that makes them light-sensitive so they must be kept in darkness, without her soldier husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), who is MIA; what’s more, the servants disappear and then a trio of mysterious domestics show up at the door to take their place . . . Enough, you say, but there are also the Others, who make most of the preceding build-up seem irrelevant. Anne, it seems, sees what might be dead people . . .

Chilean émigré director Alejandro Amenábar knows his way around the uncanny (as we saw in his Open Your Eyes, which is being remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky starring Tom Cruise, who also produced this movie — and you thought the ways of the afterlife were strange), even when he’s being derivative. Some shots terrify despite the obvious borrowing — say, from Don’t Look Now. Too bad Amenábar didn’t take a tip from Henry James and just tighten the screws rather than nailing the thing shut — The Others comes to a dead end.

— Peter Keough