The Orphanage
By James Slone
“The Orphanage,” a psychological horror film by Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona, was brought to these shores by Guillermo del Toro. It shares with del Toro’s work the quality of an old folk tale, but lacks his ornate and heady extravagance. It’s stripped down and dreary, a gothic ghost story creeping slowly forward with an atmosphere of dread. Dark things hide in the shadows away from prying eyes and CGI effects shots. It’s not really scary, and there are only a few gotcha moments. It’s more about fear than sheer terror.
The story’s heroine Laura (Belén Rueda) has a loving, supportive husband named Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and an eight-year-old son, Simon (Roger Príncep), who is unaware that he is adopted and that he was born with AIDS. Laura has moved her family to the creepy old orphanage where she grew up with hopes of opening up a home for sick children. Why anyone would want to live in this creepy nineteenth-century monstrosity is beyond me—it might as well have “Haunted” painted in big red letters on the side.
One morning, Laura takes Simon out to a cave beneath an old lighthouse. In the movie’s first spooky scene, Simon enters the dark recesses of the cave, sensing something in its depths. Laura follows him inside and finds him talking to an imaginary friend, conveniently out of view. The sight of a solitary person feeling his or her way through darkness, sometimes only with a dim flashlight, is one of the movie’s more effective visual motifs.
Laura takes Simon home, but not before he invites his new imaginary friend back home with him, leaving a trail of seashells to follow. Weird things begin to happen. A shriveled old woman appears, asking nosy questions about Simon. Household items disappear. Simon tells his mother that his invisible friends like to hide things, forcing their owners to hunt them down. Laura thinks Simon is playing games with her, reacting with anger when Simon reveals that he knows she’s not his mother. How does he know? His new friends told him.
Eventually, or course, the source of the strange happenings are revealed, though I won’t mention it here, other than to say strange deformed kids with bags on their heads are more frightening than any Saw puzzle.
Even so, I wasn’t quite as terrified while watching “The Orphange” as some of my friends were. Some of its horror edginess is compromised by the usual genre hokum, old tricks that just won’t die. There’s a scene involving paranormal investigators and a clairvoyant that bridges pseudo science with old-fashioned psychic chicanery. This clichéd bringing together of the false sciences has been going on in the movies since before “Poltergeist” and has been run into the ground by cable shows like “A Haunting.” It’s no longer scary, just laughable. Ghost stories derive their power from the irrational and emotional nature of a supernatural. Introducing fake science into movies like this takes you out of it.
The effectiveness of the film really hinges on Rueda’s performance. We watch as her skepticism melts before the supernatural events she witnesses. When Simon disappears, the police fear abduction, but Laura sees things and experiences things that eventually change her mind. But we’re never sure how unhinged she is, how much of what she sees is real. Does she simply want to believe that her son is somewhere in the house, or is there something to it? Carlos doesn’t believe so, and eventually leaves her in the house alone, where she is left to either a) descend into madness, or b) discover the truth.
“The Orphanage” works best when it concentrates on Laura’s own investigation and emotional disintegration in the face of her son’s disappearance. Some of it is a little predictable since the story is carefully laid out for you half way through the film, but the ending is still pretty surprising. Not because of any dumb twist, but because it puts a satisfying and emotional capstone on the story. It’s heartening in a queasily gothic way and you can see why del Toro liked it.