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Review by Jeremy Welsch

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I'm pretty sure if you were a former foster child growing up in a creepy old house the last thing you'd want to do is buy it later in life and reopen it. I can't speak from experience but it does seems a bit off-putting.

The Orphanage is presented by Guillermo del Toro and directed by first-timer Juan Antonio Bayona. Laura (Belén Rueda) returns to the orphanage where she grew up with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their son Simón (Roger Príncep). She plans to reopen it as a home for sick and disabled children.

Simón, an only child, has imaginary friends. This worries his parents mildly, but not alarmingly. That is until he informs his mother of a game that he and his new friend, Tomás play – a scavenger hunt which leads to the boy finding out a family secret about himself. After a period of reclusion and a chilling scene where Laura thinks she sees Tomás, Simón disappears. Without a trace. Over the next months, Laura and Carlos are slowly driven apart by the separate paths their individual grief takes. Carlos tries to remain a realist, but Laura begins to see these imaginary friends and continues to search.

Any time you have an old house as a setting, you automatically have an additional character in your movie, for good or for bad. This film benefits from the subtlety of the "performance" by the house. It sets a mood that goes beyond creaky doors and antique furniture by creating a visual style that complements the setting and the mood perfectly. Even the muted earth tones help add to the ambience of the film. Of course the setting does not completely make the movie, it just helps enormously. There are also strong performances, especially from Rueda, who wisely embodies the emotion of a mother dealing with loss without overplaying it.

This is a perfect example of how a PG-13 horror movie should be made, even though calling it a horror movie is misleading. It's a simple ghost story that does exactly what it sets out to do. The good thing about this movie is that it works very well despite the lack of blood and gore. Instead of this, it relies on a device that seems to have been forgotten by filmmakers trying for the same affect these days – tension and pacing. The Orphanage tells a genuinely intriguing and often scary ghost story that never cheats, yet explains everything in the end. The good thing about this is that it works exceptionally well. The bad thing about it is also that it works exceptionally well. Any time something works as well as this, the jackals at American studios immediately rush out multiple attempts at recreating the same feel. The result is that hundreds of remakes are dumped on us until we are completely saturated with inferiority and mediocrity.

I sat down to write this review and I had in mind what I wanted to say. One thought I had while watching the movie was, "I wonder how effective this movie would have been as an American ghost story?" Since the American version of horror these days consists of throwing buckets of blood everywhere and coming up with elaborate death scenes starring the newest flavor of the week, most times the answer is 'not at all'. And while I was getting ready to write the review I found out we won't have to wait long at all to get the answer on this one. It seems that New Line Cinema has acquired the English-language rights and plans to move forward with a remake. Couldn't we at least have let the body get cold before we started picking the meat off the bones? And more importantly, why? Haven't we proven that we can't successfully remake foreign horror? The Ring was ... ok. Beyond that I can't think of one off the top of my head. The Orphanage is the type of movie that should be seen and applauded on its own merits. I strongly recommend seeing it now, before its impact is watered down by a shoddy American remake.

And there's the rub.

Film Rating: *** 1/2 out of ****

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