Film
The Orphanage
- Director
- J.A. Bayona
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 100 mins
Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s feature debut is a handsomely staged, slow-burning and emotionally resonant haunted house flick, elegantly scripted by Sergio Sanchez in the tradition of The Others and The Innocents. It would sit very neatly in producer Guillermo Del Toro’s oeuvre, right between The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth.
The film is held together by Belen Rueda’s riveting performance as thirtysomething Laura, who moves in to a creaky, imposing, labyrinthine mansion by the sea with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and seven-year-old son Simon (Roger Princep). The prologue has informed us that she enjoyed many happy years here as a child, when the place was run as an orphanage. Now Laura plans to renovate and reopen it as a home for disabled children, just like her childhood friends. But – ulp! – Simon has started seeing dead people, and we all know what that means. His main imaginary friend is a kid with a sack on his head, who tells him he has no mother and father and is going to die. Then a creepy social worker (Montserrat Carulla) turns up and Simon discovers that he was adopted and has HIV. Shortly afterwards, he disappears altogether. Laura, who’s experiencing more disturbing childhood memories sparked by her son’s drawings of his invisible pals, becomes convinced he’s been abducted by the ghosts of her former playmates. Naturally, nobody believes her.
Loaded with Peter Pan references and heavy on tension and atmosphere, this gore-free chiller has no cheap twists to second-guess. Instead, Rueda takes us with her on what may or may not be her descent into madness. Bayona makes superb use of his creepy location and delivers some exceptionally creepy moments, including a sudden death, an extraordinary night-vision interlude where a medium (Geraldine Chaplin) wanders through the orphanage’s corridors in a trance, and a reprisal of the children’s game seen in the prologue. The bittersweet ending won’t satisfy everybody, but by this stage the film has earned a little sentimentality.
is needed now More than ever
The Orphanage is back on screen to launch the ‘shed’s very welcome July Haunted Houses Sunday brunch season to complement the release of Hereditary.
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