Mommy went mad:
Nicole Kidman & The Others

Part in a series of tributes to great genre performances.

The redheaded Australian sailoress from Dead Calm finally came to her own in 2001, going for broke in Alejandro Amenábar's The Others like few actors of her status would have dared. Forget about that other sing & dance film from the same year, this is what Nicole Kidman should have been awarded for. Overacting, maybe, but that's part of what makes it so effective and a classic performance to rank among the greatest, somewhere between Jack Nicholson in The Shining and Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion and just as powerful.

Kidman plays the deeply religious Grace Stewart who lives with her two children in a large desolated house in Jersey during WW2 while her husband has gone off to the front. Grace lives for her children, she would do anything to protect them and in the house and in the dark they are safe. For the children suffers from some strange allergy which makes them sensitive to sunlight ("The light will kill them!"), so all the curtains must be drawn and all of the 50 doors must be closed at all time. Neither is there any electricity in the house as Grace doesn't like that sort of thing. The real problems, however, arrives the same day as the new set of servants. The children starts to see and hear strange things in the darkened house, as if someone is in the house with them. At first Grace refuses to believe in ghosts and other strange ideas because "the Lord wouldn't allow such aberration", then becomes obsessed with the thought of reclaiming the house from whatever it is tormenting her and her children. But soon she instead learns that what happens to her now is directly tied to something horrible in her past. Or as her children keeps saying: "Mommy just went mad one day".

The Others is a subtle and understated old-fashioned horror movie. Haunting, claustrophobic and full of atmosphere. Amidst all this sits the ambiguous Grace, pale and statuesque in sharp contrast to the dark surroundings of her house. She's captivating and unlikable at the same time, a dysfunctional but loving mother, paranoid but with good reason, strong and fragile concurrently, pushed to the absolute edge when desperately trying to protect her children from the world outside while trying to find an explanation for the children's supernatural experiences within the house. It's her psychological journey that's the driving force of the film, her awakening when she is forced to reconsider everything she has ever believed in, forced to confront what she have done to end up in this situation and ultimately accept her fate.

»I feel more and more cut off from the world.«

However, little of this would matter if we didn't believe the performance. It's easy to forget perhaps, because of her superstar image (and perhaps because of some recent dogs in her filmography) but Nicole Kidman has proven herself to be an actress with an extraordinary depth and an uncanny ability to really crawl under the skin of the character she's playing, not afraid to go to places she haven't been to before. Scared of the dark she is not (if still in doubt, see Dead Calm one more time and think about it). It's actually hard to imagine any other actress than Kidman playing the part of Grace as pitch-perfect. It's a challenge and she eats it up as if her career depends on it. It's also an extremely complex and not very likable character to pull off, not to mention convince us to care for, but the actress manage to win us over entirely, making us feel for this unfortunate woman trapped in a situation she can't handle but have to overcome. Every small detail of her act, broad or subtle, rings completely and uncomfortably true. Every nervous look in her expressive eyes, constantly frozen wide with fear, every tense move in her fragile body, every sound that comes out of her mouth. Watch the despair grow in her tear-stained eyes in the kitchen scene near the end, where Grace hopelessly tries to convince herself that there couldn't be any ghosts because it says so in the Bible. Or the complete panic-stricken terror in her face when she discovers that not only is she dead, but she has also killed her own children, it sends a shiver down the spine every time. It's the sight of an actress dangling over the edge, allowing herself to get lost in the character and the horror she have to face, yet still in complete control of her tools and her ability as a performer. That's not just good acting, that's acting so convincing it's scary. When Nicole Kidman is at the top of her game, as she is in The Others, there's no one, live or dead, man or ghost, who can touch her and for that we are rewarded with one of the most astonishing and breathtaking genre performances in memory.