Guillermo Del Toro, director of the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth, produces director Juan Antonio Bayona's gothic frightener about a long-abandoned orphanage with a particularly troubling past.
I waited for a long time to see his film in England hearing such good reviews abroad.I was not to be disappointed .The house is so beautiful yet you instantly recognise its haunting potential.Every corner you turn and every squeaking door has you holding your breath.
Visually it is a beautiful film,as a mystery it is extremely enthralling,but above all as a ghost story it is unsurpassable .The best I have ever seen.Films come and go to me,I can't remember one Bond film from another yet I know I will always be haunted by this one .An absolute must see.
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'.
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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Please note this is a region 2 DVD and will require a region 2 or region free DVD player in order to play. Laura has returned with her husband Carlos and adopted child Simon to the large manor where she was raised in an orphanage as a child. Laura is determined to fix up the abandoned house and open it as a refuge for ill children. But from the moment she returns, the past begins to haunt her. It isn't long before she begins to see the children who she used to play with as a seven-year-old. And when Simon goes missing one afternoon, she's convinced that they have taken him hostage. What follows is a murky descent into Laura's mind, where she doesn't know what is real and what is a figment of her tortured imagination. Actors: Belen Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Princep, Mabel Rivera, Montserrat Carulla Directors: Juan Antonio Bayona Writers: Sergio G. Sánchez Producers: Guillermo del Toro, Álvaro Augustín, Joaquin Padro, Mar Targarona Language: Spanish Subtitles: English Number of discs: 2
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