Impressive, richly-detailed ghost story.

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2013)

Beautifully conceived on all fronts, "The Orphanage" creates a powerful sense of uneasiness, and is surprisingly moving at times. This elegant ghost story ignores genre conventions, and delivers a touching tale of motherhood, love, and what may or may not lie on the other side. Already with his first feature, Juan Antonio Bayona has displayed a visual grace and with an elegant compositional sense, and a true understanding of which shot to use in order to create the proper mood or emotion. The film builds suspense and terror in classical fashion as the intricate storyline unfolds. "The Orphanage" takes a modern style of filmmaking, and then matches it with your traditional horror concerns.
Set in a crumbling children's home recently reopened by ex-resident Laura (Belén Rueda), this Spanish haunted house movie begins its assault after Laura's son Simón (Roger Príncep) vanishes on a sunny afternoon. Simón has an elaborate fantasy life, or so his parents think. He keeps telling them about imaginary friends, and his circle of imaginary friends keeps expanding. It's only later that Mom begins to catch on that maybe those imaginary friends aren't imaginary, just unseen. Just who they are and what they want make up the story of the movie. Convinced Simón's stories about his imaginary friends in the spooky building, Laura embarks on a quest to retrieve him, which will push her to the limit of sanity.
As with most ghost stories, this one is more unsettling than genuinely frightening, without any real violence or gore. The chills generally come from strange noises from behind the walls, and undistinguished images appearing in the distance. This movie heavily relies on its Neo-Gothic style set in a dense, suffocating atmosphere. The tension and mystery slowly builds, as the possibility that supernatural forces that may be at work, is how it achieves its storytelling power. The spell it casts early on does not evaporate until the very end, when the epilogue has finished.