The Others (2001 film)

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 kids suffer from a severe sensitivity to light. Because of this, Grace keeps the home darkened with large curtains. One day, a housekeeper, Mrs. Bertha Mills, gardener Edmund Tuttle, and a mute girl named Lydia, arrive, all seeking employment. Grace hires them, 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. 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 home, 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 the gravestones with leaves at the order of Mrs. Mills. Grace runs into her husband Charles, whom she thought had 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. The old woman talks 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 photograph of the corpses of Mrs. Mills, Tuttle and Lydia, who all perished during the tuberculosis outbreak. 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 to death with a pillow before committing suicide. Aghast, Grace, in a twist, realizes that "the others" in the house are the living family that moved into their house, and that like the servants, she, Anne, and Nicholas are the ghosts; the ones who are dead.

Embracing her children, Grace admits to her act of murder–suicide: she had awoken afterward and believed the event to have been a nightmare. 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. Grace ominously states that the house is only theirs.

The production crew visited Penshurst Place in Kent to film at the Lime Walk in the gardens. The Lime Walk was used in the scene where Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) went looking for a priest in the thick fog and instead met her husband who had returned from the war.[5] Filming locations are, among other spots, Palacio de los Hornillos in Las Fraguas, Cantabria, Northern Spain, and in Madrid.[6]

In April 2020, Sentient Entertainment had acquired the remake rights to the film. The company plans to revamp the film by setting it in the present day.[29] Later that year, it was announced that Universal Pictures will co-produce and distribute the film with Sentient.[30]

• List of Spanish films of 2001
• List of ghost films
• The Turn of the Screw
• The Innocents (1961 film)

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