The House Where Nobody Wants to Admit They Have Already Left

Some houses look as if someone has only just stood up from a chair. The cup is still on the table. A door has been left half open. Clothes remain in a wardrobe nobody touches. Everything stays where it was, even though the person who arranged those things is gone.

That may be why The Others feels so strange. Alejandro Amenábar’s film spends most of its running time looking like a ghost story. It is also, though, a story about something much more ordinary: how difficult it can be to accept that a life has already changed when everything around us still looks the same.

To talk about that, we have to talk about the ending. Spoilers from here on.

At first, there were only noises

Grace lives with her children, Anne and Nicholas, in a large house on Jersey shortly after the Second World War. The children cannot be exposed to sunlight. One door must be closed before another is opened. Curtains stay shut. The house operates almost like a machine built to keep the outside world out.

Then three servants arrive: Bertha Mills, Edmund Tuttle and Lydia. After that come the footsteps, voices and doors. Anne insists that she has seen people inside the house. Grace searches for an explanation while the obvious possibility settles over us: there are ghosts here.

There are. We are simply looking in the wrong direction.

People really are walking through the house. They just are not the intruders. Grace and her children are dead. The living are the others.

The twist sends us back through everything we have just watched. The doors, the noises, the servants, the fog, Anne’s stories. Things that seemed designed only to frighten us suddenly mean something else.

A woman who needs every door to stay closed

Grace controls almost everything: light, doors, schedules, religious lessons, rooms and even the explanations that are allowed to make sense. When Anne insists that strangers are in the house, Grace cannot easily accept it. It does not fit the world she has arranged.

The darkness is not there merely because a shadowy mansion makes a good setting for a ghost story. The curtains have a reason. The doors have a reason. The rules that create the horror are also the rules of this family’s everyday life.

The house protects the children from light, but it also protects Grace from anything that might contradict the version of reality she needs to preserve.

Maybe that is why the title works so well

The Others. For most of the film we know exactly who that means: them. The newcomers. The people making noises behind a door. The strangers occupying a place we believe belongs to us.

Then the film changes the meaning of the words without changing the words at all. To the living family, Grace and her children are the others.

There is something very human in that confusion. We usually decide where the centre is: our home, our family, our version, our normality. The strangers are the people who arrive later.

It happens when we return to an old workplace and someone else is sitting at ‘our’ desk. When a shop that stood on a corner for twenty years closes. When we look at the profile of someone we no longer speak to and discover a life that carried on perfectly well without us.

We know things change. Watching them change without asking our permission is something else.

The servants already knew

Bertha Mills seems suspicious because she knows too much. Eventually we understand why: she is dead too. The difference is that she knows it.

That completely changes the relationship between the two women. One is desperately preserving the rules of a house she thinks she understands. The other knows those rules belong to a world that has already ended.

And that may be one of the most unsettling things about The Others: discovering the truth does not make anyone disappear. There is no bright doorway waiting to carry them away. Grace and the children remain. The house remains. The living remain too.

Some houses stay with us long after we can live in them

We are very good at keeping old versions of things. A room left untouched. A phone number we never delete. An archived conversation. A jacket that has not left the wardrobe in years. A company we still call ‘we’ even though we no longer work there.

Not necessarily because we expect any of it to return. Sometimes nobody told us exactly when we were supposed to stop calling it ours.

At the end, after Grace finally understands what happened, she and the children watch the living family leave the property. A FOR SALE sign stands outside. Grace insists that the house belongs to them.

It can sound almost triumphant: the dead are staying. But there is something sad in it too. Staying is not always winning. Sometimes it only means we still do not know how to leave.

Maybe that is what remains frightening about The Others once you know its secret. Not the ghosts. The possibility that we might cling so tightly to an earlier version of our lives that, when somebody else eventually occupies that space, we are the ones asking: what are they doing here? When perhaps the better question is: what are we still doing here?