The Others

Alejandro Amenábar's The Others (2001) is a rare thing: a truly chilling supernatural film built almost entirely on atmosphere, restraint and suggestion. A Spanish-led production shot in English, it swept the Goya Awards, taking Best Film and Best Director, and became one of the most successful Spanish films ever made.

Nicole Kidman gives one of her finest performances, brittle and commanding, as Grace, the rigid, fearful mother sealing her photosensitive children inside a permanently darkened mansion on post-war Jersey. Amenábar, who also composed the spare score, builds dread out of candlelight, fog and silence instead of shocks. He draws on the tradition of the classic ghost story, with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw chief among its forebears, and tightens the screws with exquisite patience.

The film became famous for the precision of its construction, and it is among the most elegantly engineered genre films of its time. Its influence on the slow-burn horror revival of the 2000s is considerable, and it helped bring the literate ghost story back into fashion after years of louder, bloodier horror. The Others is restrained, beautifully crafted and deeply unsettling, and it proves that the oldest tools of the form (shadow, suggestion and a house full of secrets) are still the most effective ones in the right hands, and Amenábar's were very much the right ones.