Nicole Kidman’s Performance in ‘The Others’

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores what makes Nicole Kidman’s performance in the supernatural horror film The Others so special.

Is Nicole Kidman one of our greatest living actors? Yes. Obviously. Next question.

You can’t throw a bag of AMC-branded popcorn at her filmography without hitting a performance that runs circles around her peers. Her vicious, seething anti-maternal performance in Park Chan-wook’s Stoker? Masterstroke. Her bubbly predatory turn as an ambitious newswoman in To Die For? Untouchable. And today, we’re here to sing the praises of one of her finest, and arguably most personal, performances: Grace in the supernatural drama The Others.

Directed (and written) by Alejandro Amenábar, The Others takes us into the forbidding mansion of Grace Stewart, a tightly wound, highly religious mother to two children who suffer from photosensitivity. Assuming her husband to be yet another casualty of the Second World War, Grace rules her house with impunity and precision. However, Grace’s tightly ordered world begins to buckle when strange happenings point to the presence of an unseen and potentially hostile force.

The following video essay makes a compelling case that Kidman’s performance in The Others not only rules but gains depth when read in the context of her recent divorce from Tom Cruise. It’s often repeated gossip amongst cinephiles that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut — in which the couple co-star — was the final straw in their separation. But maybe the following video essay will make you see things a bit differently …

Watch “Kidman, Cruise & Scientology: A Horror Love Story”:

Who made this?

This video essay about Nicole Kidman’s performance in The Others is by Maggie Mae Fish, a Los Angeles-based comedian, actress, and culture critic who releases short films and video essays on her YouTube account. Her work has been featured on College Humor, Screen Junkies, and JASH. And she was also a former lead actor and writer at Cracked.com. Follow Fish on Twitter here.

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Related Topics: Horror, Nicole Kidman, The Others, The Queue

Meg Shields is the humble farm boy of your dreams and a senior contributor at Film School Rejects. She currently runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She is also a curator for One Perfect Shot and a freelance writer for hire. Meg can be found screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).