Start the week with a film: In ‘The Others’, a mother confronts her worst fears

Alejandro Amenebar’s The Others has a surprise in store, much like The Sixth Sense, which preceded it by two years. Amenebar’s supernatural thriller from 2001 also shares with The Sixth Sense a quality that makes it more than a ghost story: the ability to tug at the heartstrings even as it sends shivers down the spine.

The Others, which is available on Prime Video, is led by one of the few actresses who can effortlessly portray a sense of the uncanny. Nicole Kidman brilliantly uses her face and body to portray an emotionally fraught woman trying to shield her children – and herself – from malevolent forces. (On Sunday, Kidman won the Best Actress award for Babygirl at the Venice Film Festival, but could not attend the closing ceremony since her mother died on the same day.)

Although set in the mid-1940s, the movie’s themes, characters and overall stylistic treatment are classically nineteenth-century Gothic. The plot unfolds almost entirely in a sinister-looking mansion on the fog-encircled Jersey island.

Grace lives here with her daughter Anne (Alakina Mann) and son Nicholas (James Bentley). Grace’s husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) hasn’t returned yet from World War II. The children suffer from extreme photosensitivity, which means that that the curtains in the house must be drawn at all times.

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