Blu-ray Movie Review: The Other

Ostensibly The Other (1972) could be lumped in with several other “bad seed” movies that popped up during the 1970s like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. But writer Thomas Tryon’s screenplay (based on his own novel) differs from those successful films in two very significant ways: 1) It’s told almost exclusively from a child’s perspective and 2) The guy with the pointy horns and forked tail is nowhere in sight.

It’s the former that plays the biggest role in the film’s structure. In a movie about keeping secrets, Tryon’s script struggles to keep a real whopper under wraps until about the one-hour mark. Up until then, The Other could pass for an elegiac coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of bucolic rural America just before the onset of World War II. The idea of true “evil” arising in such an unlikely setting is one of the film’s greatest assets.

Twins Niles and Holland Perry (played by Chris and Martin Udvarnoky) are flip sides of the same coin; Niles being the sensitive and respectful one, Holland his angry, selfish, and spiteful mirror image. With a large extended family living under one roof and a new baby on the way, the boys largely make up their own adventures, imaginations fueled by their grandmother (Uta Hagen) who encourages them to play “the great game,” a sort of psychic mental transference that both boys can perform at will. But this endless summer turns tragic when Holland’s mean-spirited pranks spin out of control…with deadly results.

The Other was marketed as a horror film, but it’s a decidedly unconventional one. Directed by Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird), the end result is closer to an extended Twilight Zone episode both in visual style and creative execution. The PG rating meant frequent reruns on national and local TV over the years, where this bloodless approach to scares could play in its entirety. But there’s a darkly subversive coda to Tryon’s story that is as disturbing as any of the more overtly supernatural films that would follow. Perhaps more so, since The Other exists overwhelmingly in the natural world, where evil cannot be explained away as a by-product of demonic possession.

At the same time, for modern viewers, the film can be a frustratingly obvious exercise in misdirection, with its “Shyamalan”-style secret all but telegraphed by Mulligan’s directorial choice to never film the twins within the same frame. As an audience, we’ve become too suspicious of our storytellers to blindly follow a plot without thinking one step ahead. The Other suffers a bit from our cinematic maturity, but remains a unique psychological ghost story quite unlike anything else from its era.

Twilight Time’s limited edition Blu-ray (only 3,000 copies are being produced and the disc can only be ordered at http://www.screenarchives.com) marks the film’s hi-def debut. The visual upgrade is quite striking, despite the soft focus photography and sepia-look, delivering a considerable level of sharpness and clarity missing in the 2006 Fox DVD. Extras include the original theatrical trailer and an isolated score track memorializing Jerry Goldsmith’s contribution.

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