Review by Ben Bussey
I’m quite certain I’m not the only person in recent years to have sat down to watch The Other and within the first ten minutes found myself thinking “gee, wonder if M Night Shyamalan ever saw this one.” As groundbreaking as The Sixth Sense’s grounded, dramatic take on supernatural horror might have seemed back in 1999, such an approach was quite clearly not without precedent, as this 1972 production from Robert Mulligan demonstrates. Were you to go in blind, perhaps knowing only that this was a film from the director of To Kill A Mockingbird, then the opening scenes might leave you thinking you’re watching nothing more than a fairly standard American coming of age tale, but – as the Shyamalan influence might suggest – there’s a twist in the tale.
With their matching blonde bowl-cuts, beige T-shirts and short trousers, Niles and Holland Perry (Chris and Martin Udvaronky) seem like your textbook prepubescent Hollywood twins. They’re living the textbook Hollywood rural childhood too, spending all summer playing around the family farm climbing trees, swimming in the lake, taunting the grumpy old hag next door and so forth. Of course, as is so often the case with twins in the movies, it soon transpires they’ve got a bit of that good twin/bad twin vibe going on, with Niles being the comparatively good boy who gets home on time, washes up for dinner and is kind to his unwell mother (seemingly a broken woman since being widowed), whilst Holland seems to make a point of avoiding everyone else, more or less living outside permanently. This idyllic veneer is set to be severely tarnished when a series of mysterious ‘accidents’ bring tragedy into their homestead, but – as I suspect you’ll have gathered by now – things are not as they seem.
I found The Other quite a curious viewing experience. So much about the set-up seems to directly foreshadow The Sixth Sense that I figured out the twist almost straight away, and as such found myself getting a little impatient with the whole affair until the big reveal. But the smart move here is that this central revelation doesn’t actually resolve matters at all; indeed, I’m not sure it was necessarily even intended to be a particular shock, as it’s largely self-evident from early on. Rather than closing the book, the twist simply turns things around as the final act takes us in a direction that may be a tad bit darker than we had originally expected. The publicity from the film’s release plays heavily on its ‘shocking’ content, carried over from the Thomas Tyron novel on which it’s based, and it’s easy to see how it could have had that effect in 1971, particularly given that it was a PG on release – and it has by no means lost the ability to shock today.
Above all, The Other stands as a solid example of the curious respectability horror seemed to have by the early 70s, a vibe The Sixth Sense (last time I’ll mention it, I promise) very much brought back around the millennium. While it’s considerably milder than Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen or The Exorcist, it’s that same brand of slick, well-made, upmarket genre film with high production values and proper actors, notably a scene-stealing turn from Uta Hagen as the enigmatic woman who takes Niles under her wing. Speaking as someone who tends to prefer his horror movies a bit less respectable, all this good taste and restraint leaves me a bit cold, though I can’t argue that everyone’s doing their job very well.
While it may ultimately be one of those that impressed me aesthetically and intellectually more than it actually entertained me as a horror fan, The Other is nonetheless a noteworthy film which warrants mention among all the great sinister kid shockers, and is well worth giving a look.
The Other is released to UK Blu-ray on 23rd February, from Euerka Entertainment.