Some of the credit must presumably go to The Sixth Sense for reopening the door to an old-fashioned, low-tech, thick-atmosphered ghost story. There remains plenty of credit still to spread around among the Spanish writer and director (and musical scorer!) Alejandro Amenábar, heretofore known for the overly tricksy Open Your Eyes; his compatriot cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, working so close to monochromatic darkness as to argue vehemently against waiting for the video; Nicole Kidman, in a bounce-back performance after the boop-boop-a-doopery of Moulin Rouge, re-tuned now to a Henry Jamesian (or, from The Portrait of a Lady in specific, an Isabel Archerian) quivering tautness; Alakina Mann and James Bentley as her puckered-browed, pasty-faced children; and Fionnula Flanagan as a formidable latecomer to the long screen tradition of creepy housekeepers. Set entirely in and around a gothic Victorian mansion in the Channel Islands at the close of the Second World War, the story awakens gradually to other possible presences in the house, beyond those already accounted for: the resident family of three -- minus its MIA head -- and a reduced staff of three. Not every nook and cranny of the narrative can stand up to the light shed at the end. Yet there are, at a minimum, three legitimate skin-prickling frights throughout the course of the meticulous and measured unfoldment. Those are in the bag before the final twist. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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