And although there isn’t any magician’s assistant handy to disappear, there is always the baby. There’s that trapdoor in the barn, for example - the one that killed Father. That can put ideas in the head of a young lad with imagination.
At the real sideshow, the magician’s assistant slipped out of the trunk by dropping through a trapdoor, just before the magician stuck the swords into the trunk. Niles decides to hold his own little magic show. All of the people inside look evil and menacing and seductively unhealthy. Niles goes into town to the circus, for example, and sneaks into the freak show. Mulligan also has given the movie a weird Gothic feel and populated it with grotesques. It is a time of drowsy summers and half-remembered baseball scores, and a time for a boy when everything is bigger than life, and scarier. Mulligan, whose last film was “Summer of ‘42” and who gave us another nostalgic portrait of the past in “ To Kill a Mockingbird,” places his film in the rural 1930s. But Mulligan plays, a cagey game with his camera, always showing us Holland from Niles point of view, but never showing us Niles as Holland would see him (if Holland were there). It all depends on whether Niles is schizo, or whether Holland really has returned from the dead, possessed his twin brother’s soul, and is stage-managing the troubles. Robert Mulligan’s “The Other” is a movie that is maybe about the supernatural and maybe not. Just ask Father, or Mother, or Russell, or Aunt Vee.
And when Niles gets in trouble, everybody’s in trouble. Everyone else in the family is under the impression that Holland is dead and buried, but Niles sees him clear as day, and talks with him, and they play together out in the woods. Well, maybe Holland departed and maybe he didn’t.
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