The Orphanage 2007 Directed by: Juan Antonio Bayona Cast: Belen Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Princep, Mabel Rivera

Written by: Joanne Ross January 7, 2007

The Orphanage is the feature film debut of Spanish director, Juan Antonio Bayona.  With the aid of a powerful screenplay by Sergio G. Sanchez, and strong performances from the cast, Bayona delivers a chilling, atmospheric film which not only scares, but moves us with the redemptive power of a mother’s love.

The Orphanage is a haunted house story in a similar vein with Robert Wise’s The Haunting, Jack Clayton’s, The Innocents, and Alejandro Amenábar’s, The Others, with a dash of Poltergeist thrown in for good measure. The film opens during an idyllic afternoon in the garden of the Good Shepherd Orphanage located on the coast of Spain. Young orphan Laura (Mireia Renau), and her friends Rita, Martín, Victor, Guillermo, and Alecia are playing on the lawn of the orphanage. Little do they know that their friendship is about to be disrupted and their lives torn apart—Laura has just been adopted and the staff are waiting for just the right moment to break the news to them.

Fast forward to the present. Now a married woman, Laura (Belén Rueda), her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo), and their adopted son Simón (Roger Príncep), have bought and reopened the orphanage for the purpose of caring for disabled children. One day on an outing to the beach with his mother, Simón wanders deep into a cove and there meets his newest “invisible” friend Tomás. 

On the day of the orphanage’s open house, Simón refuses to come and meet the parents and children who’ve come to visit unless Laura goes with him to look at his friend Tomás’ little house.  Inpatient with his games with invisible friends, Laura gets angry and slaps him. Later, when she returns to the house to find him, she encounters instead an oddly dressed child wearing an eerie sack mask standing in the hallway just outside the bathroom. Assuming it is Simón, Laura reaches out to him, but the child—whoever it is—shoves her back so hard she falls into the bathtub and then locks her inside the room. When her husband releases her, they frantically search for Simón, to no avail. He has disappeared.

Director Bayona knows how to exploit our fears of spooky houses with too many rooms, dark places and the unknown. Repeated use of extreme low-angle, establishing shots gives us an imposing, yet creepy house weathered and worn down by time, misdeeds, and painful memories.

Bayona’s use of pacing in the story reminds me very much of a crafty fisherman patiently letting out just enough line to slowly reel his fish in. While unfolding in the present, the story has the seeds of its beginnings in Laura’s past, and Bayona reveals the relevant details to us, one bit at a time, and we slowly become aware of the enormity of the situation.  Belén Rueda is riveting as Laura, giving us a mother so intrepid, so determined to find her son that she is willing to consult a medium (Geraldine Chaplin) to help her locate her son.

Part of what scares us in horror films, particularly those of the haunted-house variety, is the use of sound effects. And Bayona and his sound team use them to great effect. This is a haunted house that is very much alive, judging by the sounds of creaking, breathing, gasping, heaving, groaning, moaning, and banging going on within its walls. These are the sounds of pain, suffering, anguish, and despair—the sounds of the children who once lived there, who are now long-gone physically, but whose spirits remain trapped.

For me, the most frightening moments in the film occur when the medium Aurora is regressed. She wanders down the labyrinthine corridors leading us through and deeper into the heart and soul of the house—deeper into the heart and soul of the mystery behind Simón’s disappearance.

The Orphanage is that rare horror film. As much as it tells a story that chills, it also tells one that warms. As much as it tells a story that is heartbreaking, it also tells one that is uplifting. It is a powerful and complex film, masterfully done by a talented new director. This is film well worth seeing.

I’m pretty sure any time you are a former foster child growing up in a creepy old house the last thing you want to do is buy it later in life and reopen it.  I guess I can’t speak from experience but it seems a bit off-putting on its own.

The Orphanage is presented by Guillermo del Toro and directed by first timer Juan Antonio Bayona.  It is about Laura (Belén Rueda), a former resident who returns to the orphanage where she grew up with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their son Simón (Roger Príncep) with plans to reopen it as a home for sick and disabled children.  Simón, an only child, has imaginary friends that worry his parents mildly, but not alarmingly.  That is until he informs his mother of a game him and his new friend, Tomás play – a scavenger hunt that leads to the boy finding out a family secret about himself.  After a period of reclusion and a chilling scene where Laura thinks she sees Tomás, Simón disappears.  Without a trace.  Over the coming months, Laura and Carlos are slowly driven apart by the separate paths their individual grief takes.  Carlos tries to remain a realist, but Laura begins to see these imaginary friends and continues to search. 

Any time you have an old house as a setting, you automatically make an additional character for your movie; good or bad.  This film benefits from the subtlety of the “performance” of the house.  It helps create a mood here that goes beyond creaky doors and antique furniture by creating a visual style that compliments the setting and the mood perfectly.  Even the muted, dull earth tones help add to the ambiance of the film.  Of course the setting does not completely make the movie, it just helps.  There are also strong performances, namely from Rueda who wisely embodies the emotion of a mother dealing with loss without overplaying.

This is a perfect example of how a PG-13 horror movie should be made.  Even though calling it a horror movie is misleading.  It’s a simple ghost story that does what it set out to do.  The good thing about this movie is that it works very well despite the lack of blood and gore.  Instead it relies on another device that seems to have been forgotten by filmmakers these days trying for the same affect – tension and pacing.  The Orphanage tells a genuinely intriguing and often scary, ghost story that never cheats, yet explains everything in the end.  The good thing about this is that it works exceptionally well.  The bad thing about it is that it works exceptionally well.  Not bad directly, but any time something works well like this, the jackals at American studios immediately rush out multiple attempts to recreate the same feel.  The result is all the remakes we get dumped on us until we are oversaturated with inferior redo’s until the well runs dry. 

I sat down to write this review and I had in mind what I wanted to say.  One thought I had while watching the movie was, “I wonder how effective this movie would have been as an American ghost story?”  Since the American version of horror these days is throwing buckets of blood everywhere and coming up with elaborate death scenes that star the newest flavor of the week, more times than not the answer is ‘no’.  While I was getting ready to write the review I found out we don’t have to wait long to get the answer on this one.  It seems that New Line Cinema has acquired the English-language rights and plans to move forward with a remake.  Can’t we at least let the body get cold before we start picking the meat off the bones?  And more importantly, why?  Haven’t we already proven we can’t successfully remake foreign horror?  The Ring was just, ok.  Beyond that I can’t think of one off the top of my head.  The Orphanage is the type of movie that should be seen and applauded on its own merits.  I strongly recommend seeing it now, before its impact is greatly watered down by a crappy American remake. 

And there’s the rub.

1/2