We don’t see a lot of good ghost stories these days. It’s always killers, butchers, monsters, etc… and when we do get a ghost story, it tends to be a malicious one, which turns the film into for all intents and purposes a monster movie. What happened to mysterious sounds and creepy corners? Are films really not creepy anymore unless somebody dies a horrific death?
Not to say, of course, that there are no horrific deaths in The Orphanage, but that’s just not the main sell of this chiller for once. First-time feature director Juan Antonio Bayona has made a classic ghost story, obvious from the familiar props: an empty mansion, invisible children, secret hiding places, and dark buried secrets.
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, The Orphanage has been called and marketed as this year’s Pan’s Labyrinth, though there’s very little similarities between the two. It is, however, very reminiscent of an earlier arthouse triumph by del Toro—the exquisitely atmospheric The Devil’s Backbone, also about the ghosts of children set in an orphanage. Like Backbone, The Orphanage surrounds its scary scenes with a strong story and stronger characters. While Backbone is thematically about children who lost their parents, The Orphanage is the other way around.
It starts with a woman named Laura (Belén Rueda) and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo), who buys the orphanage where Laura grew up with the intention of turning it into a home for disabled kids. Their adopted son Simon quickly takes a turn for the weird as they arrive, amassing a group of invisible friends to play with. Stranger things happen when Laura hears clanking sounds at night and catches a mysterious woman hiding in their tool shed.
On the big day when parents take their disabled kids to survey the mansion, a boy in a creepy mask attacks Laura, and Simon disappears without a trace right after. At first they believe him to be kidnapped, but Laura starts to see and hear things at night. She believes that there are spirits there, and they know something about Simon’s whereabouts. During these parts, the film is at its most effective, showing Laura’s growing obsession with the house’s secrets and the bumps coming from empty rooms. Who are the woman in the shed and the boy in the mask? In true ghost story fashion, a big tragedy in the past that makes your skin crawl is uncovered. In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro made us wonder if the fantasy is real or a girl’s escape from a horrific reality. Here, Bayona proposes that the supernatural is just a disturbed kid’s projection (wonderfully telegraphed by a shot of the creepy masked kid amidst a backyard party full of mentally ill children, also in masks) and a desperate mother clinging on whatever hope she can get.
It’s a great trick: the film makes you want to believe that the ghosts are real because you want Laura to have a chance to be with Simon again.
There are some setbacks. A big chunk of the second act, where Laura starts to enlist the help of a psychic, tries to do scares in the style of programs like Ghost Hunters, and it’s really more annoying than scary. The film on the whole is well photographed, with several shots transcending its own macabre into something beautiful and graceful, so to have it suddenly switch to fuzzy noises and a night vision camera is pathetic. However, it justifies the existence of this sequence by showing the frustration of the skeptic Carlos towards her wife’s asylum-ready behavior, and his reaction actually puts a better perspective on what’s going on. The fact that this sequence is so out-of-place and banal adds to the theory that Laura is just a grief-stricken mother gone off the deep end, that she has to fall for cheap parlor tricks (unless, of course, you actually believe that those shows are authentic).
The Orphanage more than redeems itself with its horrifyingly sad and twisted ending, where the story of mother and son comes full circle. Of course it’s best to not say what it is, but even if you know what’s going to happen, the anguish that Belén Rueda portrays in Laura is all too affecting. It is, after all, as much a story about orphans (it’s in the title)—and ultimately parenthood—as it is about ghosts. The fact that Simon is Laura’s adopted son and not her real son is an important detail that expands her surrogate role by the end of the movie; revealing also her strong ties to the orphanage itself. The remarkably stirring and memorable way the twist and final moments of the film are executed makes this an excellent horror film—a tragic drama laced with spooks.
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January 10, 2008,
laura_m_morgan
said:
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this sounds great! not usually into horror, but this has really grabbed my attention! bring on the sleepless nights that will inevitably follow watching this film! |
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Votes: +0 |
