The Orphanage (2007)

Of the various chambers that exist in the manor that is the horror genre, the haunted house picture may be the picture that’s most encouraging of that potentially exhilarating, disconcerting wedding of appealing cinematic surfaces (think of the smooth, deep, ironically beautiful cinematography that characterizes The Innocents) with the dank emotional textures that constitute our everyday fears. Of all the possibilities the horror genre offers, the haunted house picture is perhaps the ripest metaphorically, which is saying something. We know that haunted house pictures, or stories of the supernatural in general, deal with the fear of dying, with fear of the dark, of change and moving on, with deep buried skeletons in the closet, but they’re usually just as concerned with the breakdown of the family unit; the fear, not of the skeletons, but of the necessity to face the judgment and pent-up emotional heat of our family once said skeletons are revealed; the fear of discovering your relatives, not as your relatives, but as flawed beings with their own agendas and damage.

The Orphanage is clearly, undeniably, indebted to many of the usual suspects of the haunted house genre, particularly those that concern themselves with the fragile mental state of young-middle-aged women such as the aforementioned The Innocents or The Others; but this film has an emotional intensity that transcends the puzzle-box tropes (the red herrings, the bumps in the night, the doubts of sanity) that dominate some of the modern movies; this picture is beautiful, but it doesn’t have a vice directorial grip, there’s an empathy here. New director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez have invested an old genre (that I love) with a tang of real passion and undoing; you watch the picture less for the punch-line and more out of a legitimate, rare, fevered concern for the protagonist. Bayona has unavoidably been compared to Guillermo Del Toro (who serves as “presenter” here) and that’s partially valid, but it’s a mark of the picture’s generous, human appeal that Pedro Almodóvar just as easily came to mind. The Orphanage, like much of Almodóvar’s work, is concerned with women first and foremost: their fears, their burdens, their reservoirs of strength and pain.

The Orphanage has you from the title; it’s an uneasy word, signaling an uncomfortable reality of injustice and partial breakdown. We don’t like the word under the cheeriest of contexts (providing there are any) much less as the title of a horror picture. The film opens, as many of these pictures have a habit of opening, in the past. Children are playing a game outside of the orphanage, which is appropriately, diabolically grand, elaborate and beautiful; the ideal breeding ground for ill will and wrong doing. An adult watches the children play from inside, and informs a caller that Laura has not yet learned that she is to leave the orphanage.

The image fades and we are then introduced to the adult Laura (Belén Rueda), the implications of that past day left hanging as one of many question marks that soon follow. Laura has returned to reopen the orphanage, accompanied by her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and child, Simón (Roger Príncep). Bayona has a young filmmaker’s fun (as well as a talented filmmaker’s flair for) taunting us with the various clicks and uh-ohs that traditionally comprise the first act of these pictures. A social worker with sad, bug-eyed glasses (Montserrat Carulla) appears, projecting all around strangeness as well as a disturbingly specific knowledge of Simón’s background; Simón, already socially troubled and drawn toward the imaginary, tells Laura of new invisible friends that bear a disturbing resemblance to Laura’s own childhood peers, they also have a disconcerting habit of leaving very real footprints behind. Simón, in one of the more unnerving bits in the film, even leaves seashells behind so his new friends can find their way back…

It would be unfair to discuss the picture’s plot any further, but I will say that these films hinge on their ending as much as any other genre in the business. The Others is a luscious, scary ghost story with a fine Nicole Kidman performance (perhaps her best) but the ending was disappointingly derivative of another recent scare picture, and I guessed it before the half-way mark. The Haunting’s implication that poor Eleanor would forever be among the house’s many tortured spirits is satisfyingly eerie and circular, and helped put that film (as well as the book) over to legendary status. The ultimate resolution of The Orphanage is far-flung, but it’s also a simple, ghastly doozy. Bayona almost squanders the force of it with an epilogue that’s leftover Pan’s Labyrinth, but that’s splitting hair.

Rueda (The Sea Inside) is a beautiful, expressive actress and she invests Laura with a survivor’s guilt and distance that deepens the themes of the genre without editorializing or killing their livelihood. Laura is a woman, a possibly failed, self-loathing protector, not another princess ripe for murder. Carulla is frightening in a bit that skirts cliché to lend the picture its quiet, admirably gray moral longing. Geraldine Chaplin appears, in a bit that resembles Poltergeist in conception but (thankfully) not execution (that picture relied on effect after effect for affect). The Orphanage sketches Chaplin in green light, and lets you do the rest, that haunted, piercing face another indelible portrait of the fade that powers all of these pictures and that eventually comes to consume everyone.

The Orphanage isn’t a classic, it’s ultimately more about past genre films than anything else, but it’s a visually magnificent, rewarding picture, and Bayona already, refreshingly, understands that the dark can’t rival what you’re faced with when you catch your reflection unexpectedly, whether it be during the day or at night.

★★★½

Posted on May 7th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Horror |

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