Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Chilean-Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar is that, on top of acting as a writer and producer on the films he directs, he’s also the composer. Amenábar is one of the most acclaimed contemporary filmmakers in Spain, winning nine Goya Awards, including one for his score on The Sea Inside. What’s so compelling about this is precisely what makes his films oddly staid: they’re the kind of mid-budget prestige films that were endemic in the TWC era of Hollywood (early-1990s-early 2010s), before that part of the market was totally upended by the simultaneous upheaval of streaming on production and the broad infantilization of cinema from gold rush on superhero movies and reboots of old IPs.
Amenábar still works (he has a film new film out this year about Miguel de Cervantes’ time in military captivity that boasts a €14 million budget), yet almost every facet feels either anachronistic or the films exist as outright atavistic endeavors. This most obviously manifests in his musical compositions, which opt for classically big orchestral scores, even when it doesn’t tonally match the film at hand. Most egregious is his sophomore feature Open Your Eyes, which has an at first ambiguous dream-within-dream structure which then slowly reveals itself to have a science fiction element (it’s obvious that Christopher Nolan borrowed pretty heavily from Open Your Eyes when making Inception)—the problem here is that the score’s sensibilities are more at home with a film from the 1950s rather than the 90s, and whose cueing methods mainly existed in popular film at the turn of the 21st century in movies that were more directly referential with Old Hollywood.
It works much better in Amenábar’s English-language follow-up The Others, a ghost story set in an aging estate in WWII-era Jersey. Starring Nicole Kidman as a paranoid mother of light-sensitive children, Amenábar turns the manor into a constantly tense maze of locked doors and closed curtains, flipping the usual haunted house script by having some of its most terrifying moments when the light spills in. Here the classical styling of the music fits perfectly into the tone, as does Amenábar’s old-school direction. The Others basically works, although there’s not much to it beyond being a successful horror movie, and one with a signature twist that’s so wrongfully associated with M. Night Shyamalan when Amenábar should be considered either its master or worst offender, depending on your viewpoint.
The Others, while something of a throwback to canonized haunted house films like, say, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, but Amenábar’s film lacks that je ne sais quoi that makes so many old horror films great. Universal horrors are handmade, and Val Lewton gives enough latitude to Jacques Tourneur to make some bizarre and oneiric works that transcend their ostensible goals as shockers. Amenábar’s genre work in The Others could be discussed similarly to how Bazin labels post-war Westerns as “super-Westerns,” which are constructed on referentiality to and the distillation of older works in the genre. The Others takes base assumptions about the genre setting and ultimately inverts it, which from a thematic standpoint can be seen as self-serving, but Amenábar’s a skilled enough craftsman that the apparent first goal of the genre—to be scary—is met very well along the way.
There’s something refreshing in going back to this 20-year-old work in a time when horror has been taken over by what some call “elevated” (a terrible term, like “vulgar auteurism”), where the films have to acknowledge the audience’s genre knowledge while still making the films “about something” (again, as if horror films never were). This is a result of a post-Scream paradigm, where Wes Craven took the rules of slasher movies in order to cut them apart for irony-poisoned Gen X’ers. While I think it’s led to terrible imitators, I like this point of Craven’s career, and think his brash operatics created some delightfully corny horror-thrillers (I’m a sucker, especially, for the ridiculously over self-reflexive Scream 3). Craven, too, has an affinity for old-school orchestras, making Amenábar’s popular genre work a kind of Spanish cousin to Craven.
There’s no film where the two are more closely related than Amenábar’s debut Tesis, itself a post-Scream thriller, and of the rare variety that’s good. The film stars Ana Torrent, best known as playing the little girl (also named Ana) in Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. Here she plays Ángela, a grad student studying violence in media and looking to find snuff films. She recruits her advisor to troll through the university’s archives, which leads him to a hidden backroom of VHS. Ángela finds him dead from an apparent heart attack after watching one of the tapes, and when she shows it to a horror-obsessed member of her cohort, he points out that the girl in the film getting killed is one of their classmates who disappeared. From here Amenábar weaves a slick, slippery thriller as Ángela thinks the killer is likely the victim’s ex-boyfriend who’s also studying at the film school, and she tries to prove he did it without letting him on, complicated further by a violently palpable sexual tension that’s growing between the two.
Tesis is a populist genre film at its finest, where its machinations are enthralling and it leaves enough thematic ambiguity just below the surface to make it a film that could be discussed endlessly (how many people have written their own theses on a movie called Thesis?). It’s a perfect debut for Amenábar, too: a showcase of his aesthetic inclinations and technical proficiency in everything from the decoupage to his ability to make music good enough for movies that he’d be offered for-hire work as well. There was probably no better time for him to fit in, either, than coming onto the scene a year after Scream upended horror and The English Patient bored audiences but was loved by Academy voters—it was the perfect time to be middlebrow. But that moment was fleeting, and for the better part of the last two decades Amenábar has been all but forgotten outside the country he was raised in. That is, maybe, until Criterion recently released a new 4k of The Others. Perhaps he’s rife for reassessment.