Set in the shadow of World War II, The Others follows Grace Stewart, a devoutly religious woman living with her two children, Anne and Nicholas, in an isolated, mist-shrouded mansion on the island of Jersey. The year is 1945. Her husband is away at the war and presumed killed in action.
Grace runs her home with strict discipline, partly due to her temperament and partly because both children suffer from an unusual condition known as photosensitivity direct sunlight can harm them.
This makes the house unnaturally dark, with heavy curtains drawn across every window and doors always closed before another is opened.
Grace hires three servants: Mrs. Mills, the housekeeper; Mr. Tuttle, the gardener; and Lydia, a mute maid. Their arrival coincides with a shift in the house’s atmosphere.
Anne claims to see a strange boy named Victor, along with other unfamiliar figures, but her mother dismisses the sightings as imagination. Grace maintains that the house belongs to them, her word is law, and her faith in God will keep them safe.
Still, odd occurrences mount. Doors that Grace swears she closed are found open. Footsteps echo in empty rooms. The piano plays by itself. Curtains seem to be pulled back when no one is there.
Even more unsettling is Anne’s insistence that she has seen “the others” an old woman, a man, and a boy she speaks to. Nicholas, frightened but devoted to his sister, begins to believe her.
The mystery escalates when Grace’s husband, Charles, suddenly returns home from the war, walking through the fog as if lost.
His arrival brings no joy; he is distant, emotionally cold, and seems confused by his surroundings. After a short time, he leaves again, saying he must return to the front, even though the war is over. His reappearance is never fully explained, only adding to the film’s spectral atmosphere.
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The Shocking Twist: Ghosts Witnessing the Living
The final act delivers one of modern cinema’s most memorable reversals. Everything the audience and Grace believed about the haunting is turned inside out. The “others” in the house those Anne and Nicholas have been seeing are not ghosts at all. They are the living inhabitants of the mansion, and Grace’s family are the actual spirits.
The truth starts to bleed into their reality when Anne and Nicholas run away to escape their mother’s anger. In the fog-covered grounds, they stumble upon three gravestones. The names carved into the moss-covered stone are chilling: Bertha Mills, Edmund Tuttle, and Lydia.
The children realise the servants have been dead for decades. At the same time, Grace discovers an old photograph of the trio in the servants’ quarters a type of “mourning portrait” taken after death, something common in Victorian times.
Convinced the servants mean harm, Grace attempts to get rid of them. But the real confrontation comes when the children see the elderly woman again. This time, the old woman is at a table, speaking to them directly, her eyes unblinking and piercing.
The woman is actually a medium, conducting a séance with the new living family occupying the house. Grace bursts into the room to stop her, but instead of halting the ritual, her presence strengthens it.
Anne and Nicholas find they can no longer speak directly to the living. Their voices are replaced on the séance’s notepad, where messages appear telling the horrific truth.
Through the medium’s questions and the automatic writing process, Grace is forced to remember what she had buried deep inside her mind: after a breakdown brought on by grief over her husband’s presumed death, she smothered her children with pillows and, in despair, killed herself with a rifle.
This revelation reframes every strange occurrence earlier in the film. The sounds of furniture scraping, doors opening, and faint whispers were not ghostly attacks on Grace’s family, but the normal activities of the living family trying to co-exist in the house.
Victor, the boy Anne claimed to see, was one of these living occupants who sometimes saw the spirits. Grace and her children were the ghosts haunting them.
Themes of Guilt, Regret, and Acceptance
What makes The Others more than just a ghost-story shocker is the emotional weight of the twist. Grace’s actions come from a place of unbearable loneliness, war trauma, and the crushing stress of raising two sickly children in isolation.
Her intense religiosity, meant to bring order and comfort, instead becomes part of the repression mechanism that hides the truth from herself.
Once the truth surfaces, the reaction is not relieved acceptance but a quiet, complex realisation. She has condemned herself and her children to remain within the walls of the house for eternity. Interestingly, the servants who are also ghosts are not malevolent but resigned to their condition.
They explain that they have seen many families come and go, both living and dead. Mrs. Mills tells Grace that sometimes the living become aware of the dead, and sometimes not, but life and death intermingle in this place.
The children’s disease is gone, allowing them to walk freely in the sunlight for the first time a bittersweet discovery, since it comes only after death. For Nicholas, this is a small joy; for Grace, it is a reminder of what could have been. Yet she holds firmly to the idea that the house is theirs, and no living person will change that.
Lasting Impact: A Haunting Beyond the Grave
The ending of The Others lingers far beyond the credits. On a first watch, it’s a sophisticated ghost mystery with clever misdirection. On a second watch, the meaning of each early scene changes. The unexplained noises are no longer ominous signs of supernatural malevolence but the innocent sounds of the living.
The fear in the children’s voices when they speak of “the others” becomes even more poignant they were looking at real, breathing humans, while themselves belonged to a different plane of existence.
Cinematically, Alejandro Amenábar’s direction leans heavily on atmosphere rather than gore or sudden shocks. Thick fog, muted colors, and candlelight create a feeling of claustrophobia that mirrors Grace’s mental state. The house itself becomes a character, its silence stretching like the memory of a tragic event that will not fade.
Religious undertones thread through the story, questioning sin, punishment, and the afterlife. Grace’s inability to reconcile her faith with her actions mirrors the audience’s own discomfort in recognising the humanity in someone who has done the unthinkable.
The servants’ calm narration of ghostly existence makes death feel less like a clean separation from life and more like an endless continuation in familiar surroundings.
By telling the haunting from the perspective of the dead, The Others reverses audience expectations and reframes the genre. Instead of being terrified of some lurking spirit, the audience is made to empathise with those people clinging to their home, their memories, and their identities.
Even the film’s final image, the camera panning over the mansion as the fog rolls in suggests that this cycle will repeat. More living families will come. More strange crossovers between worlds will happen. Grace and her children, though at peace with the truth, will never truly leave.
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