During the Depression, Niles and Holland Perry (Chris and Martin Udvarnoky) live on a farm in Connecticut with their mother, Alexandra (Diana Muldaur) and several other family members. Niles and Perry are twelve-year-old twins. Their pregnant sister Torrie (Jenny Sullivan) and her husband, Rider (Jack Ritter) also live on the farm, as do their Aunt Vee (Norma Connolly) and Uncle George (Lou Frizzell) along with their obnoxious son, Russell (Clarence Crow). Niles and Holland’s mother had a nervous breakdown after her husband died. She spends most of her time in her room in a depressed and confused state.
The boys’ grandmother, Ada (Uta Hagen) lives there as well. Ada is an Old Russian immigrant. When they were younger, Ada taught the boys the art of astral projection. The children are able to send their consciousness into the mind and body of other creatures and feel what they are experiencing. Niles calls it the great game.
As the summer passes strange events begin to take place on and around the farm. Russell is killed when he jumps from the barn’s hayloft into a giant pile of hay and is skewered by a pitchfork. The handyman, Mr. Angelini (Victor French) is blamed for leaving the pitchfork in the hay. While at a carnival the twins see a magician do a disappearing trick. Holland decides to do his own magic act. He plays a trick on the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Rowe (Portia Nelson), a cranky old lady that the twins harass from time to time. This results in Mrs. Rowe having a heart attack.
Other things happen that result in others either being hurt or killed. Each time something bad happens, Holland Perry is usually nearby. Even so, Ada knows that there is something deeper going on with the twins, something far deeper and very evil, and that the great game may have a big part in it.
“The Other” was released in 1972 and was directed by Robert Mulligan. It is an American psychological thriller with horror aspects. The film was based on the 1971 novel by Thomas Tryon.
I read the book in school. When you compare the two, the movie misses some of the nuances that made the book so good. One of the great aspects of the book is that every chapter ended on a cliffhanger. Each subsequent chapter started a new scene, so you had to wait to find out what happened in later chapters. This caused me to not be able to put the book down. I read it in one day. There’s no way the movie could capture that effectively. The book was also able to delve deeper into the psychological differences between the twins and how they reacted to events.
That being said, looking at the film as its own identity, the movie has some good points and some bad points. It starts out a little slow and doesn’t really get going until after the hour mark. That’s when you find that little pieces begin to fit together and the action revs up. At that point, the movie became far more interesting.
Thomas Tryon was an actor turned author. Science fiction fans may remember him as the alien husband in “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” 1958. He died in 1991 of stomach cancer. Chris and Martin Udvarnoky, who played the twins Niles and Holland Perry, never acted in another film.