into the west

I finally saw The Others. It was on telly last night. This psychological horror features one of the most beautiful women in the known universe – Nicole Kidman – and the man who brought back Dr Who with a northern accent, Christopher Eccleston.

Frustrated after seeing clips and excerpts over the years, I kept saying to myself, ‘One day I shall sit down and watch this movie from beginning to end’. Well, it happened. And it was a most interesting experience. Rather than being left feeling scared, I was overwhelmed with sadness. I shouldn’t give the whole game away. There might still be one or two folk out there, who like me, have always intended to put this film on the box and see it from start to finish. Suffice to say it is a ‘haunted house’ story with a deep, thought-provoking twist.

Kidman plays the part of Grace Stewart, a Catholic mother who lives with her two children in a massive old house on the island of Jersey. The kids are allergic to sunlight – a condition now known as xeroderma pigmentosum. Straightaway there are some interesting elements – Kidman herself is Catholic, the children have to live in darkened rooms, and the location is the Channel Islands, which so far as I know, isn’t often used as the setting for a spooky tale. But it fits well, because it’s at the end of World War II and the Nazis have gone – leaving behind a traumatised and isolated island community.

Grace’s daughter Anne, played superbly by Alakina Mann, keeps seeing strange people around the house. And the spooky goings-on accelerate from there. A team of servants turn up mysteriously to help run the place, but even they seem to have an agenda. And then Grace’s long-lost, missing-in-action husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) is suddenly found wandering about in the fog. Nothing is as it really seems.

Perhaps the key phrase from the entire movie is when the Irish housekeeper Mrs Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) says, ‘Sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living’. This is the core message of the film, and it leaves us with much to think about. Spiritualists communicate with the dead, and Catholics pray for them, and both belief systems are represented in the movie. As well as being a good yarn, the story compels us to consider how do we position these two worlds? How should the seen and the unseen exist alongside one another? Is it a choice between spiritualism and Catholicism, or is there another way of living in a multi-dimensional reality?

Grief is a vital process that helps us to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. This is followed by the popular phrase, ‘Time to move on’ – which is right, of course, one cannot mourn forever. And yet we feel we cannot completely abandon someone who appears stronger than other memories. Even the Bible tells us we are ‘surrounded’ by a ‘great cloud of witnesses’ that has gone before us, and then lists the heroes of faith.

But the real ghoul that haunts our homes may be something completely different. Worse than hobgoblins and foul fiends is surely the spectre of secularism, the phantom of rationalism, which beckons us to focus solely on the material world. That is the twilight zone, the darkened room, the foggy woodland we must fear. For there is no childlike wonder, no sense of a greater reality, no likelihood of an afterlife, no hope at all in that grim universe. (Photo: www.allmoviephoto.com)