The Orphanage
I slept with all the lights on last night. The Spanish language fantasy renaissance continues with ‘El Orfanato‘, the debut of director Juan Antonio Bayona who under the tutelage and support of Guillermo Del Toro has crafted a superbly terrifying movie with a number of twists, chills and thrills.
Our heroine is Laura who with her doctor husband Carlos and adopted eight year old son return to take over the dilapidated orphanage she grew up in some thirty years ago. Simón is unaware that Laura is not his real mother and has a number of imaginary friends that he talks to whose numbers swell once he is ensconced in the orphanage with his family. Of course, they are imaginary aren’t they? After a visit from a mysterious social worker enquiring into Laura’s motivation in restoring and reopening the orphanage, Simón goes missing and events start to turn spooky…
After a somewhat uneven first half hour or so the film beds down and slowly unfurls its story, history and plot revealed layer by layer compounded with a series of very effective supernatural scenes. As always with these films there is a certain suspension of disbelief – I’m sorry but after the first ‘spooky’ incident I would exit the premises at Mach Three never to return – but this is pulled off by the film being just so goddamn creepy and atmospheric. There are quite a few big fucking jumps and one sequence toward the end which is absolutely outstanding in its building of tension and a sense of the uncanny. You’ve got to love seeing properly constructed scary movies like this at the cinema where the tension in the whole audience is palpable as characters tentatively wander down dimly lit corridors and then BANG everyone jumps out of their seats, popcorn flying as a loud crash reverberates around the auditorium. Heh, I love it….
I shouldn’t neglect to mention Geraldine Chaplin (yes, the daughter of Charlie) who gives a short but effective performance as a medium who at Laura’s request visits the site and in a trance reveals some of the terrible history of the institution. This is a new starring member of the genuinely scary, genuinely frightening film brotherhood, films with very little violence or gore which is an approach which always was and always will be infinity more effective in manipulating and affecting an audience. It nestles up with Robert Wise’s ‘The Haunting‘, Jack Clayton’s ‘The Innocents’ (which it shares many, many similarities), ‘The Shining’, and ‘The Others’ to name but a few.
Watch out for the ambulance.
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