Barnaby Walter, 27/07/2008
In the current "movie climate", when a film is branded a horror movie, you could be forgiven for expecting something disgusting, torture-crazed and sadistic. This unfair contamination of the genre has been down to recent efforts such as the "Saw" franchise, "Hostel" and the recent Brit blood-splasher "W?Z". Those who expect something similar with this Spanish film will be disappointed. Those who would rather be claustrophobically menaced by subtle plot developments and a well written script, this is a treat. The plot's refreshingly old fashioned premise is intriguing; a married couple and their son move into a large, rundown house. This house holds memories for Laura, the wife and mother, memories which have remained buried. It was her childhood home when it functioned as an Orphanage, and she wishes to revive this status by opening it as a home for handicapped children. However, she has taken it for granted that the memories of her old have vacated along with the past residents. She realises that this is not the case, when her own son starts to make friends with invisible children, and then, in a terrifyingly tragic scene, disappears without a trace.
Although we have got into the habit as a movie going public to think "more visceral violence the better", "The Orphanage", which is presented by Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro, reminds audiences that less gore is more. The jolts and frights don't rely on images of flesh eating and zombie rape. They are engineered by the clever manipulation of the viewer's fear of the past and the unknown. This may be an over-used idea by film-makers, but in this case the film really does benefit from the art of narrative restraint. The suggestion of something more terrible than fear itself is a constant theme; as we see Laura and slightly drippy husband Carlos desperately attempt to find their missing son by looking into Laura's murky past and the time she spent at the Orphanage when she was a child. The most fear inducing scene in the film is when Laura is confronted by someone from her past; a childhood acquaintance who dons a bag-stitched mask, and has a habit for following people down empty corridors.
Bayona's direction is effective, making the "grab-your-friend's-arm" moments increase in frequency as the movie progresses, but doesn’t let them loose shock impact. This could be because the whole film is shot with deceptively beautiful camera-work, with watercolour greys mixed with deep reds. We can truly empathise with Laura as a character, as we see Belen Rueda’s near-perfect performance of a mother's pain bleed out of the screen.
For a film that, by rules of it's genre, is obliged to scare, it goes further by making us cry not with fear, but with the moving emotion we are seeing onscreen. Mixing echoes of Barrie's Peter Pan with themes reminiscent of past similar works (The Others, The Sixth Sense) "The Orphanage" not only proves that horror is, as a genre, continuously evolving. It reminds us that Spain is becoming a movie making giant that is prepared to stand up to Hollywood cliché'.
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David Bowen, 17/07/2008
It is subtitled but that doesn't stop the film being excellent, and somewhat scary. A few 'jump out of the seat moments'. One of the best films I have enjoyed for a long, long time and I don't normally see foreign films.
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