[horcrux2007]

The Others (2001)

I decided to watch The Others again, which I watched back in December, so that I can see what all the praise is about. Whenever the critics give a horror film great reviews like this movie received, I typically agree with them. I thought that now that I've seen movies like Repulsion and The Innocents that I could better appreciate what The Others tried replicate. While I love how it tried to go ultra-retro, the problem with The Others isn't that it isn't scary. There are many scenes that were very well executed. It's the fact that after a certain scary scene, the movie would just stop dead in its tracks. There were be a couple of minutes where the tension is rising and the atmosphere is layered on, but after the scene is over, it goes back to being extremely slow and boring. I'm fine if there is a scary scene and then the movie slows down a little bit, but The Others slows down to an absolute crawl, which was probably because it didn't seem like Grace was really interested or scared by the "ghosts". What made movies like Paranormal Activity or The Babadook so effective is that you could feel the characters' fear throughout the entire film. I didn't get that from Grace at all.

4/10

What sucks even more is that I really want to like this movie because I loved The Innocents and Repulsion, and it seems like this is another movie I'd love, but I simply can't force myself to like a movie.