It’s Friday night, and you and your friends are headed to the movies to catch the latest horror flick that you’ve been dying to see. After months of watching the ever-so-creepy trailers pop up in between your favorite shows, you’re finally going to see the movie that will be sure to give you the scare of your life. You’ve got your popcorn, your perfect seats, the lights dim and…nothing. You leave the theater thoroughly disappointed because everything scary was in the trailer and the actors were just running around screaming the entire time. You think to yourself, “Well, I guess horror movies are never good movies,” making yourself feel a bit better about wasting the last ten bucks in your wallet. The Orphanage however, is in a class of its own, it’s not just a great horror movie, but a great movie as well. It doesn’t rely on gruesome deaths or special effects, but instead on a great script, perfect setting and phenomenal acting. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a person who rattles easily, so when someone gets decapitated in a movie, no big deal. However, a creepy little child in a long dark hallway wearing a dirtied burlap mask was enough to make me and the rest of the people in the theater scream out loud more than once.The movie centers on Laura (Belen Rueda), who as a young girl spent some years in an orphanage on the Spanish coast until she was adopted, never knowing what became of the other children she had to leave behind. Many years later, after adopting a child of her own, Laura and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo), decide to move into the old orphanage, which has been abandoned, making it into a home for sick and disabled children. Their seven-year-old son Simon (Roger Princep), who has imaginary friends, will now finally have other children to play with. Shortly before the opening of the orphanage, Simon befriends a new boy down at the beach named Tomas, who appears only to him. Five more children quickly become part of Simon’s circle of friends, creating elaborate scavenger hunts for him that border on menacing intentions. The grand reopening of the orphanage finally comes, and Simon is less than thrilled to meet the new children. He is perfectly content playing with his imaginary group of friends, which frustrates his parents. Carlos believes it’s because he is acting out for attention, while Laura is more skeptical of the situation believing it may have something to do with the orphanage itself. As Simon runs off to play in his imaginary world, Laura sees something that makes her question if her son’s friends are a little more than imaginary. Scared and confused Laura looks for Simon, and when she cannot find him she immediately becomes frantic and realizes that he has completely vanished.
Laura begins digging up the past, searching for answers as to what happened to the children from the orphanage and how it relates to her son’s disappearance. She soon becomes immersed in the world that Simon was so fixated with and eventually goes on a scavenger hunt of her own, set up by the children, to find her son.
The Orphanage is directed by newcomer Juan Antonio Bayona, and produced and presented by well respected director Guillermo del Toro, who made the critically acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth last year. The Orphanage is this year’s Pan’s Labyrinth and a horror masterpiece, which has already been chosen by the Spanish Academy of Films as Spain's nominee for the 2007 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film.
The real jewel of this movie though, is Belen Rueda, who delivers a performance that nearly brought me to tears. The relationship between mother and son is fixed in your mind throughout, so when Laura loses her son in the middle of the movie, you feel an intense sorrow for her. In other horror movies you’re just in it for the creative deaths, rooting for Paris Hilton to bite it in the most gruesome way in House of Wax, but in The Orphanage you really care about the family. Since Simon vanishes halfway through and Carlos doesn’t play too important a role, Rueda gets that much more credit for going it alone.
The Orphanage is definitely the must-see of horror movies this year with its quick paced story and its scream out loud scares. I guarantee you will be seeing more of Juan Antonio Bayona in the future, and if the writer’s strike ever ends, you’ll definitely see it pick up some awards at this year’s Oscars.
Grade: A
