The other tryon5/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Niles tries to be good but causes unimaginable suffering to the ones he loves and ends up in an insane asylum that is, the family home. Holland, all eleven years of him, covets, lies, and kills, and is still idolized by his twin, Niles. Take this family, the Perrys, in this movie, The Other. From my perspective, nobody deserves what they get. ![]() ![]() His dad dead eight months, his brother four, and traumatized Mother rarely leaving her room, who’s to teach him how to be a father and a man?Ī friend of mine once said nobody gets what they deserve. At the cusp of adulthood and the opportunity it offers, he remains unformed, never to emerge from his pupa like the Mexican jumping beans he gives Alexandra as a gift, to her dismay: she knows what he doesn’t realize he’s telling her. The image is counterpointed in the film’s last shot, situating Niles looking out the window as the family barn and apple cellar, symbol of former fruitfulness, are bulldozed. This is what had become of the 2001 Starchild in just four years, a monstrous, clearly fake symbol of not limitless possibility awaiting realization but constrained grotesquery, stillborn. ![]() One of the few indelible images in director Robert Mulligan’s 1972 film of The Other is that of Niles in the freaks’ tent at the 4th of July fair, gazing at the Hydrocephalic Boy in a jar. ![]()
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