Chilling

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2008)

I'm not usually a big fan of scary movies but Spanish movie The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is so well made, such a classy movie, that I found myself riveted to my seat even as I was chilled. I saw it first in the theatre then rented the DVD later to see it again, not something I often do. This is a very good example of how to make a deeply disturbing film with barely a drop of blood and no gore. It's produced by Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's Labrinth, and similar themes of childhood imagination are revisited.
Laura (Belen Rueda) spent her early years in The Orphanage, a large remote house near the beach in northern Spain, where she lived with a small group of other children and her caregivers. But she was adopted at quite a young age and left her friends behind, losing touch with them. As an adult, she moves back to the now unoccupied house with her physician husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their adopted son Simon (Roger Princep) with the intention of setting up a small care home for mentally disabled children. Simon is an only child and he lacks playmates so he invents imaginary friends, but soon after they move in to the house, strange things start to happen; an elderly lady masquerading as a social worker visits and is later found ransacking the storage shed, the house is filled with creepy noises, and Simon insists that he can see a group of children in the house, that his friends are not imaginary but real. Simon wants his mother to visit the 'little house' of his friend Tomas but she dismisses it as childhood fantasy. Then, at an open day for the new care home, Simon disappears completely.
Months and months go by but there is no sign of what happened to Simon. The police have no clues but the old lady who visited the house is run over in the street, and an investigation reveals that she once worked at the orphanage. Who was she and what happened to Laura's friends after she left the orphanage as a child, and most importantly, what happened to Simon? How can a child disappear without trace? Lacking police leads, Laura is drawn to a psychic in a desperate attempt to find Simon. Her husband is equally desperate but warier of being conned. The Orphanage shows the fine line between the supernatural and mundane reality; sometimes a creaking house is just that, a creaking house, and ghosts are all in the mind. But overwhelmed with despair, Laura, certain that something terrible has happened in the past, decides to try and recreate that past, in a last desperate attempt to communicate with her childhood friends and find her child. The ending is satisfactory although sad.
What makes The Orphanage work for this scary movie skeptic is the excellent standard of the performances and the atmospheric mood of the film. It is rarely 'jump out of your seat' type scary, more bone chillingly dark and moody, taking us back to a time when to be a disabled child often meant a lonely and unhappy life, rejected by society. Overall, very good.