THE ORPHANAGE (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007) ***

Rating: 7/10 (11 September 2008)

I’d heard a lot of good things about this Spanish ghost story produced by Guillermo del Toro; having finally caught up with it, I can say that its reputation is well deserved – since the generally subtle approach to the genre here puts to shame Hollywood’s current trend in visceral horror! The only real quibble I have with the film is that plotwise it offers relatively little that’s new – though the ending does obfuscate matters a bit by suggesting it may all have occurred merely in the protagonist’s mind! As ever with this type of effort, we have a restless soul from the beyond (usually, it’s a child – which is why they’re so unsettling, and the film’s most haunting image certainly involves the creepy kid with a sack over his head) who, by making contact with a living being, is able to unearth a concealed past crime – even if this came upon following his own ill-fated demise!
The film does get the eerie atmosphere centering around a vast, darkened and remote building absolutely right – with cinematography, score and sound being, as expected, carefully deployed; even so, the leading performance from Belen Rueda is notable and, as an added treat, we have a wizened Geraldine Chaplin playing a traditionally eccentric medium (more than the obvious POLTERGEIST [1982] or THE HAUNTING [1963], these scenes reminded of the classic British made-for-TV chiller THE STONE TAPE [1972] by Nigel Kneale). With respect to twists, we have the heroine being unwittingly responsible for her own child’s ghastly death as well as – equally coincidentally – that of the culprit of the old murders (complete with an unnecessarily weird shot of the woman’s dislocated jaw!). Still, the game which Rueda and her kid play – wherein a series of clues will lead to the discovery of some object – is cleverly developed into a motif, thus paving the way for the climactic revelation.
For the record, Del Toro had himself earlier delivered two notable efforts revolving around kids – the somewhat similar THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (2001) and the more elaborate PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006). Incidentally, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973) and CRIA CUERVOS (1975; also with Chaplin) are two other famous Spanish films about childhood – watching her here and Ana Torrent (who actually appears in both of them) in THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL (2008) recently has made me yearn to pick up their Criterion 2-Disc editions which, until now, weren’t that much a priority for me…