Alejandro Amenábar is at his most persuasive when he makes us listen to a dark house and watch someone struggle to stay composed. We rate his patient suspense, though that patience can harden into stiffness.
Fi1m perspective
In The Others (2001), a disturbance in the house makes us listen for someone the picture has not shown. Alejandro Amenábar leaves enough time for that uncertainty to become uncomfortable, without resorting to graphic violence. We were frightened because the sounds kept suggesting a presence we could neither locate nor dismiss. His restraint works because we have time to imagine what might be there, and cannot make the next sound arrive any sooner.
His feature debut, Tesis (1996), was produced by José Luis Cuerda. The psychological science-fiction thriller Open Your Eyes (1997) followed, before The Others brought him an international audience. The Sea Inside (2004) and the historical drama Agora (2009) broadened his work towards moral dilemmas beyond the thriller. The danger, noted by critics of Agora, is that explaining the subject leaves less room to care about the people.
Kidman’s performance is essential to why The Others works as well as it does. Grace’s effort to hold herself together gives Amenábar’s careful writing something more urgent than the preparation of another scare. He lets her distress remain central, so the house is frightening for reasons that belong to this mother rather than to any convenient ghost story. The writing carefully limits what we know, but the actors prevent the film from becoming an exercise in arranging clues.
The same control is less helpful when it governs every pause. Editor Nacho Ruiz Capillas gives the disturbances in The Others room to develop, but some stretches outlast the unease and leave us waiting for the film to get on with it. Amenábar’s own score sustains the mood, though the sound and silence do more to frighten us than the music. Start with The Others, provided a ghost story that occasionally keeps you waiting is still your idea of an evening well spent.
Biography
Alejandro Amenábar is a Chilean-Spanish film director, screenwriter and composer. Born in Santiago de Chile in 1972, he moved with his family to Spain at the age of one and studied cinema at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid before dropping out to make films.
He wrote, directed and often composed the scores for his early features Thesis (1996) and Open Your Eyes (1997). His international breakthrough came with The Others (2001), which he wrote, directed and scored, starring Nicole Kidman. Subsequent films include The Sea Inside (2004), Agora (2009) and Regression (2015).
Amenábar has won nine Goya Awards, including Best Director for The Others, and accepted the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Sea Inside on behalf of Spain.
