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Last year, Guillermo del Toro scared the living daylights out of daring subtitle readers in his Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth. This year, he puts his name (as producer) on another horrifying Spanish film, El Orfanato (or The Orphanage in English).
Ever since she left the Good Shepherd Orphanage, Laura (Belén Rueda) always wanted to go back to the place that always seemed like home. Now she and her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), and their son, Simón (Roger Príncep) have moved into the old house by the beach—with the intention of setting up a home for special-needs kids.
Though Simón has always been especially imaginative, his imagination runs wild once they move into the old orphanage. He tells Laura that he’s met new “friends” at the beach—imaginary friends who like to play games. One day, Simón reveals that one of his new friends, Tomás, told him that Laura isn’t his real mother—and that he’s going to die. Laura and Carlos assume that he’s been digging through their paperwork, since they never told him about his adoption—or about the fact that he’s HIV positive. But when Simón disappears just days later, Laura starts to believe that his friends may have something to do with his disappearance.
The Orphanage (directed by Juan Antonio Bayona) is a plain-and-simple, classic style thriller that relies on the things that go bump in the night for its greatest scares. Most of the elements of the story are pretty familiar—the creepy old house with a past, the kid who sees things that no one else can, the kid’s disappearance, the mom desperately trying to get him back. The story is often reminiscent of Poltergeist—and maybe a little bit of The Shining. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing—because it has that classic horror feel to it. It’s the same kind of eerie, psychological/paranormal stuff (with a few truly shocking moments) that gave you nightmares after you saw Poltergeist for the first time.
Despite its similarities to some of the classics, though, The Orphanage still manages to stand on its own. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s much more artfully presented—and a whole lot smarter—than you’d expect a scary movie to be. It’s hauntingly beautiful, and it’s surprisingly well developed. The realistic characters and their simple but suspenseful story will pull you in—and the film’s overall feeling of uneasiness makes it all the more haunting.
It’s nice to see that there are still a few thrillers out there that consist of more than just some guy with a chainsaw chasing buxom blondes around some dark alley for an hour and a half. Even if you’re not usually one for subtitles, fans of thoughtful thrillers like The Mist won’t want to miss The Orphanage.
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