The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (2007)

Written by Nick Da Costa | Tuesday, April 8, 2008 |

Horror has been horribly neglected by Hollywood of late. Since Hideo Nakata’s chilling ‘Ringu‘, Asia has dominated the market. Recently France and specifically Spain have rejuvenated the classic tropes of the genre, both terrifying and enchanting audiences with a mixture of well crafted characters, story and scares. This is no less true of Juan Antonio Bayonara’s The Orphanage (El Orfanato).

Produced by celebrated Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, this is the tale of Laura (Belen Rueda), once inhabitant of the titular orphanage, now returned with a husband and adopted son afflicted with HIV. Though the place is all but abandoned Laura believes she can turn it into a home for children with mental disabilities, and while her son Simon begins to construct complex fantasies to do with the house she assumes it is just to do with the imaginary friends he has nurtured for so long.

Until that is, Simon disappears.

Unlike Del Toro who used the analogy of a child’s absorption in the horrors of fantasy to analyse the very real horrors of the Spanish Civil War with the ‘Devil’s Backbone‘ and more recently ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, Bayonara relishes the simple pleasures of genre, finessing every aspect of the horror film, much like his countryman Amenabar did with the equally impressive ‘The Others‘. However, while that film rested solely on the shoulders of an established director, The Orphanage suffers a silly, but inevitable comparison between its director and backer and while this is a sublimely accomplished debut, to some it could seem slightly simplistic.

But such a comparison would be unfair. Bayonara has no need to be burdened by metaphor, and as a consequence avoids becoming muddled in his primal drive to terrify. That is not to say that you won’t be stirred by the film. Rueda is quite fantastic, giving a perfectly pitched performance as a bundle of nerves slowly unravelling before our eyes, recalling Donald Sutherland’s breakdown in the classic ‘Don’t Look Now’. And while the rest of the cast are little more than ciphers, that’s part and parcel of the psychology of horror films; the director isolating the central character, separating them from support be it mental or physical.

And Bayonara puts both Laura and the audience through the ringer, constructing some excellent slow burn sequences of tension, moving from the wild openness of the coast to the enveloping curves of the orphanage. So confident is he in his endeavour that the disturbing central image of a deformed child in a burlap sack is presented to us in full view early on and yet still it evinces the same horror of a drawn out reveal.

Most importantly this is not a generic take on horror, instead it feels like the director is passionately embracing the rich mythology of folklore and fables to produce some truly terrifying moments, mixing traditional boo scares (the aftermath of the traffic accident) with the psychological in the perfectly constructed sound design of a spooky séance.

It is unfortunate that this passion and emotion, while being a real positive, also has to be a negative, as the film strays into melodrama; the soundtrack reaching hysterical heights at times. It feels a little out of balance with the subtlety in which the film has unfolded up till then. But these are minor criticisms in a film that’s both elegant and effortless and of such power that it belies the relative inexperience of its director and marks out a major new talent in a genre that truly needs it.

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