The Orphanage
first wants to convince the viewer that it’s a
straightforward horror film, only to chill them before morphing
into a more-substantive ghost-story. Director Juan Antonio
Bayona assembles the movie as such in the hopes that it will
succeed twofold by offering a scary first two acts and a
thought-provoking third. To a certain extent, the approach is
functionally employed: The Orphanage certainly represents
a new breed of supernatural-themed filmmaking. The movie is,
however, plagued by one major flaw. Because Bayona and
screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez tell the story in the fashion of
trivial horror pictures for the film’s first eighty-minutes, the
material doesn’t develop enough density to support its ambitious
conclusion. In the end, The Orphanage feels more like an
undercooked “idea movie” than the affecting experience that it
would like to be. There simply isn’t enough of a foundation here
to form a truly effective product around.
The film’s
protagonist is Laura (Belén Rueda), a woman who is deeply
passionate about the process of caring for children. She knows
the traumas associated with growing up in an
isolating-environment because she was an orphan herself. Laura’s
strong feelings on the matter lead her to adopt a child, Simón
(Roger Príncep), who she raises as her own. (In fact, she and
her husband Carlos [Fernando Cayo] do not even tell the boy that
he isn’t their biological son.) Additionally, Laura has made her
family’s home in the very orphanage that she grew up in,
planning to use it to raise sick and mentally-challenged kids.
Problems at home
arise, however, when Simón begins to develop imaginary friends,
one of whom creepily wears a sack over his head. Simón’s belief
in these figures becomes even stronger when he discovers that
Laura and Carlos are not his real parents. Transfixed by his
supposed hallucinations, Simón disappears completely, without a
trace. Whether he was abducted or ran away himself is a mystery,
but Laura suspects that a mysterious, elderly social-worker
(Montserrat Carulla) who taunted her days before kidnapped the
boy. After months of searching for Simón and finding no record
of this social worker, Laura begins to believe that the
disappearance was caused by something much more otherworldly.
She postulates that Simón’s invisible friends were not imaginary
at all, but ghosts of the orphanage’s past who stole him away
from her.
As The
Orphanage’s plot thickens and Simón’s disappearance gets
more complicated, it becomes very clear that the movie isn’t an
average ghost-story or horror-film. As I previously mentioned,
this comes to be especially problematic during the conclusion,
which offers a pay-off that is left unsupported by the rest of
the movie. This relates particularly to the character of Laura.
As good as Belén Rueda is in the role, she cannot overcome the
triviality of the character created by the one-dimensional
horror set-up. The climax and conclusion of The Orphanage
require the viewer to truly feel for Laura as she is thrust into
a vulnerable, harrowed state in coming to terms with the
supernatural nature of her son’s disappearance. This simply
isn’t attainable because of the way the picture is assembled.
The viewer doesn’t care any more for Laura than the average
film-protagonist, and this lack of sympathy ultimately results
in them feeling apathetic toward what is supposed to be a
suspense-laden third-act.
The Orphanage
is not without its merits, however. Visually, the film is an
absolute knock-out, oozing in style that achieves an eerie aura
that restores some of the punch that its finish is missing. In
fact, on a technical level, I wouldn’t be surprised if the
picture was nominated for several Oscars. Cinematographer Óscar
Faura’s glossy, shadow-filled cinematography gives the The
Orphanage a very nice luminescence; each frame is
intriguingly lit and photographed. Iñigo Navarro’s art direction
and Maria Reyes’ costume design also both contribute to the
densely-developed mood of the film. Even if the project
ultimately fails due to its emotional distantness, it is
considerably redeemed by its said keen sense of aesthetics. Not
to mention, its narrative does carry impressive amounts of both
conviction and ambition. For these select admirable traits,
The Orphanage will ultimately make for a decent DVD-rental
down the line.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 1.6.2008
Screened on: 12.31.2007 at the AMC
30 at the Block in Orange, CA.
The Orphanage is rated R and runs 105
minutes.
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