The Others

In 1945, on the remote British isle of Jersey, Grace Stewart lives with her two young children Anne and Nicholas in a vast, perpetually shuttered country house. Both children have a severe photosensitive condition that means daylight could kill them. The house is run on strict rules: every room is locked when not in use, all curtains are drawn, every door is shut behind one before the next opens. Grace's husband Charles has been missing since the war.

One morning three new servants appear at the gate — elderly housekeeper Mrs. Mills, gardener Mr. Tuttle, and the mute young Lydia. They claim to have worked at the house years ago. Mrs. Mills moves through the rooms as if she knows them perfectly. Grace, exhausted and devout, hires them on the spot.

Strange disturbances begin. Doors Grace was sure she locked stand open. A piano plays itself. Anne reports seeing an old woman in the rooms, and a young boy named Victor with his family. Grace dismisses Anne as making it up. Then, while undressing Anne in front of a mirror, Grace turns to see her daughter has briefly been replaced by an old woman in the same nightgown — and Grace beats the figure, only to realize she has been hitting her actual child.

Grace finds a hidden Victorian photo album of post-mortem portraits and an old wedding photograph of the servants. She confronts Mrs. Mills, who quietly admits that yes, they all died of tuberculosis in the house decades earlier — but does not say more. Grace tries to leave and discovers an impossible fog at the property line that pushes her back to the house. Charles momentarily returns to the gate, dazed and uniformed; he tells Grace he came back only to say goodbye, then walks back into the fog.

In the climax, the 'intruders' Anne has been seeing turn out to be a real living family — the new owners — holding a séance with a blind elderly medium in the upstairs drawing room. The medium, channeling Anne, reveals what Grace has been refusing to remember: in her grief and isolation after Charles vanished, Grace smothered her children with a pillow in a psychotic break, then shot herself. The house has been their unburied afterlife ever since. Grace, the children, and the servants are all dead.

Grace accepts the truth. The living family flees the haunted house. The film closes on Grace and the children at the window, calmly watching the new residents drive away, with Grace declaring that this house is theirs. They will remain forever.