With the horror genre saturated by the splatter fests and torture porn typified by the Saw and Hostel franchises, it’s a welcome respite to be served up a chiller that hasn't had its heart ripped out.
The Orphanage sees Laura (Belén Rueda) and husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) return with son Simón to the now disused children's home where Laura spent her youth, with the couple planning to re-open the home to care for a group of disabled children.
Events take an unsettling turn when Simón begins to interact with some new invisible friends, who may or may not be the building’s past residents. When her son disappears during a re-opening party for the home, Laura is drawn into a desperate search to find him and, in the process, uncover the orphanage’s dark past.
Horror and Heartbreak
First time feature director Juan Antonio Bayona’s film carries the executive producer stamp of Mexican horror/fantasy maestro Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone). A master of creeping, sustained tension rather than slave to cheap gory thrills, Del Toro’s influence on the younger Bayona is evident. In particular, the theme of the private worlds of children, often as fraught with danger and filled with tragedy as the public lives of adults, invites comparisons to not only Del Toro’s work, but various genre classics from The Innocents to The Others.
Bayona does an excellent yet restrained job of ratcheting up the suspense, allowing the whodunit mystery of Simón’s disappearance unfold in parallel to the exposition of the horrifying and heartbreaking secrets of the orphanage’s history. Preferring to keep his audience on the edge of their seats rather than jumping out of them, he nonetheless throws in a couple of genuinely shocking quick-fire scares, and while his use of the old horror staples of creaking doors, rolling thunder and bumps in the night is somewhat unimaginative, it retains most of its power to unsettle.
A Mother's Quest
Rueda turns in a fine performance as Laura, a mother who will balk at nothing, be it of this world or another, to retrieve her son. Bayona neatly condenses the climax of her months long search into a few tension filled scenes involving a cruel treasure hunt, nail biting séance and a final act where Laura finally confronts the forces she believes are behind Simón’s disappearance.
Rueda’s understated, moving portrayal of a heartbroken parent and the sub plot of the orphanage’s tragic history lend this old fashioned ghost story its emotional weight. If Bayona had only resisted the urge to over tug the heart strings in the highly sentimental last scenes, he could have had a much more affecting and effective end to his tale. Nonetheless, the film’s pervading sense of melancholy persists long after the credits have rolled, a rare feat in today’s horror landscape.
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