Film Review: The Orphanage
January 10, 2008 – 5:18 pm | by J Caleb Mozzocco
You know someone in the film business has really made it big when his credit as a producer alone is enough to sell a movie. That’s the case with The Orphanage, which comes, as the movie poster boasts “from producer Guillermo del Toro.”
Del Toro’s only one of the seven producers credited for working on the film, which is actually written by Sergio G. Sánchez and directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, but emphasizing his involvement isn’t simply empty marketing. The look and feel of The Orphanage, or the spookier sounding El Orfanato in the original Spanish, does feel heavily informed by del Toro’s work, particularly his little-seen 2001 film The Devil’s Backbone/El Espinazo del Diablo, which similarly dealt with Spanish speaking orphans and the supernatural.
Laura (Belén Rueda) was an orphan who grew up in a spooky old beachside orphanage. As a (rather shapely) adult and young mother, she and her doctor husband (Fernando Cayo) return to the now abandoned orphanage. They’re planning to reopen it as a school for sick children, like their adopted son Simón (Roger Príncep), who is HIV positive.
A lonely and imaginative boy, he increasingly talks about his imaginary friends, evidence of whom Laura discovers. When Simón disappears from the house, Laura and Carlos freak out, as their son needs daily medicine to stay alive, and it falls on Laura to unravel the mysteries of the haunted orphanage to save her son.
Antonio creates several indelible images, including a child in a dirty school uniform with a scarecrow sack over its head—a fresh version of the creepy child archetype that’s been stuck in a post-Ring J-Horror iteration the past few years—and a killer scene in which a tag-like game is used to summon spirits.
But while moments like these—and a pretty gross one involving CPR on an accident victim missing her lower jaw—make for a fine horror movie, The Orphanage transcends the genre ghetto by succeeding as a story as much as a scare-factory.
Sánchez and Bayona have constructed their film as a fairly complicated narrative, a remarkably unified whole in which little to no information is wasted, and many scenes reflect back on previous and later ones, changing the way you perceive them at later points. That is, it’s not just a good horror movie, but a good movie period, an accomplishment that is as welcome as it is fairly rare.
Tags: guillermo del toro
2 Responses to “Film Review: The Orphanage”
By Amy on Jan 13, 2008 | Reply
Just saw this film last night and really enjoyed it. I even freaked myself out getting up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and I can’t remember the last time that happened.
Please don’t read further if you have not seen the film - I have a question that may be a spoiler…
I believe, like Pan’s Labyrinth, that this is one of those films where you are never really sure if its real or just in the character’s mind. I tend to believe that it was her own despair that led her to the end, however, that in way makes it more interesting than actual ghosts - although god knows I love my horror!!
Question: My boyfriend and I could explain away everything that happened that pointed to it all being in her head - no actual ghosts.
However, when she goes into the closet at the end to put the doorknob on the door she has to peel back wallpaper to get to the doorknob - how is that possible without the intervention of spooky children ghosts?
I had my hands over my eyes but my boyfriend swears that she had to peel it off, meaning that it was not left the way that Simone left it. It also would correspond with the title credits with the wallpaper tearing graphics….
If wall paper actually covered up the knob - it would change our thoughts on this. Please tell us what you think!!???
By LA scientist on Jan 26, 2008 | Reply
I just came back from the movie and had the exact same thought about the wallpaper! I think it was a sly way for Guillermo del Toro to leave open the interpretation that it really was ghosts, and not that perhaps the rational interpretatoin may not be right.