The Orphanage a Powerfully Compelling Ghost Story
Laura (Belén Rueda) has come home. She and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) have just purchased the dilapidated country orphanage the woman grew up in as a child with the desire to re-open the place for special needs children with nowhere else to go. It is a way for her to give back to the place that made her who she is as well as being the perfect venue to raise her own secretly ill son Simón (Roger Príncep).
There are ghosts amongst us in Picturehouse's The Orphanage
But things are not all wine and roses. The orphanage is haunted, Simón making friends with a few of the invisible specters inhabiting the creaky old building. When he suddenly disappears, Laura becomes obsessed in her belief that the spirits of her old housemates are somehow holding him captive deep within the building. Convincing Carlos to leave her for the weekend alone, this distraught mother must find a way to communicate with the world of the dead if she ever hopes to bring her child back to the realm of the living.
A gothic melding of The Others, The Haunting and The Devil’s Backbone, director Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage (produced by fellow Mexican wunderkind Guillermo del Toro) is an ingeniously horrific freak show which both glued me to my theater seat in shivering fear and brought me to cascading showers of emotional tears. Audiences looking for scares both smart and subtle are going to eat this thing up, the film so magnificently assembled the filmmaker should put on a clinic on how to construct a fascinatingly suspenseful horror film.
In other words, this one is great. Even better, the less I say about the thing the more gloriously entertaining it will be for viewers. The glorious thing about this one is that the less you know about what it going on the more rapturous the tension becomes, and while writer Sergio G. Sánchez’s script doesn’t exactly go in a direction 100-percent surprising the paths it takes to get there are so deliciously suspenseful I’m guessing most people won’t remotely care.
Relative newcomer Ruedo (Saving Grace) is wonderful here. Her descent into tortured madness at the disappearance of her son is totally gripping. You believe her completely in this, and even while the rest of the world is starting to question the poor woman’s sanity I never once disagreed with the choices she was making in her single-minded quest to find her son.
As for Bayona, like his fellow amigo compatriots del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu this director is a master craftsman worth keeping an eye upon. The Orphanage is a seriously seductive freak show the left me feeling as if I’d just ridden the world’s scariest and most energizing roller coaster, the filmmaker building the film with such subtle nuance and imagination I wouldn’t have been able to tear my eyes away from it had I tried.
It all builds to a crescendo so soul-shattering I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing. While this twist isn’t exactly a surprise, what is shocking is just how all-encompassing this emotional toll ultimately proves to be. I was physically sobbing during the screening, many of those around me doing to the same, the full cost of forgiveness on display inside this ghost story as profound and as monumental as any I could have imagined. At least as far as The Orphanage is concerned, sometimes going home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
Additional Links:
- The Orphanage Theatrical Trailer
