Beautifully Tragic

Rating: 8/10 (9 April 2008)

While Orfanato is reminiscent of other films, The Dark for example, Orfanato ends on a note reminiscent of Japan's original Dark Water. Where a mother must make the ultimate sacrifice to care for the lost children, who are not just lost to this life, but this world. And while Dark Water is an exceptional film in this regard, it is a daughter ultimately who is left behind and not a husband. But either way, the heart wrenching remains, and magnificently does it echo long after the curtain falls.
Orfanato is a little slow, but it is a spectacular film for those willing to immerse themselves in the story as it unfolds.
At one point we might imagine that the boy had hidden away in the secret room in the closet, only to get locked in by the mother's own hand when returning the metal supports which propped against the secret door, the ghostly knockings being the son trying to get it, ultimately to die there in what became his tomb. At the moment the mother finds the hidden passage, and the body of Simon and screams out, it seems in a flashback it occurs to her what happened to her son who had been missing for so long.
And yet so many other strange happenings suggest something dark and treacherous is going on as well but are they really or is it all perception? We have the medium who comes to the house, we see the children in the end, and so we are left with 2 possible outcomes to the story.
One in which the son gets accidentally locked under the stairs and dies, only to be found much later by mom who realizing what she did, takes pills to commit suicide and throws herself into the ocean.
Or two, she slips into the other world to care for the children beyond this life.
Whichever way you choose to look at it, this movie was fantastic. Comepelling, beautiful, haunting, not all that scary mind you, but enticing enough to keep you wondering, and a very nicely developed story.