The Orphanage

This is a Spanish "horror" film produced by the director of the overrated and meaningless Pan's Labyrinth. But it has less in common with that film than with a recent pair of (a term I am coining here) "maternal horror" films: The Others and Dark Water. I'll come back to that later in the spoilers section. For now, we can say that these films draw primarily on The Turn of the Screw (or its brilliant film adaptation, The Innocents) for their premise, combined with a too-keen awareness of "empty nest syndrome" as having possibilities for horror. The best part of The Innocents, of course, is the weirdly virginal OCD of Deborah Kerr, so half the game is lost when you have the mother *be* a mother.

Which, technically speaking (and this comes out like 5 minutes in), the woman here (Belen Rueda) is not. Her (ridiculously adorable) child is adopted, but that seems to have no bearing on anything else in the movie. Is there some trope I'm unaware of, where orphaned children can't have children of their own? So, that doesn't signify anything. And neither do many other aspects: there is a great boring swath running through the middle of the film, until the movie abruptly snaps back into the concerns of its early scenes.

Many people will think that a film all taking place in one location, Aristotle-style, will add to its intensity: The Innocents, The Haunting, Die Hard, etc. This is not true for The Orphanage. I got bored with the location fairly early on.

The first hour of this movie is pretty solid, but only because it handles things in a manner alternately relaxed and contemporary, then "classic," then Hitchcockian (one scene only: see spoilers), only occasionally sliding into a "nowadays horror" vibe. Everyone seems to want this film to be the anti-Saw, the anti-Hostel, the anti-Rob Zombie. But that seems to me to be apples/oranges. What ought to be remarked upon is how very *2007* the film is: the editing, the title screen, the numerous production companies involved, the boring music, the CGI, the casting, the reliance on spooky children still lingering from recent Japanese horror exports, etc. It is definitely a post-Amelie movie, and no one will be confusing it with The Haunting or The Innocents.

****SPOILERS****
Obviously the filmmakers thought they had a good Freudian scare going here. The central mystery, the search for the HIV-positive (this also signifies nothing for the film) child turns around another mystery-axis, namely the return of something unwanted and unsearched-for: the parallel death of a deformed child years earlier. To spell it out, the deformed child was "hidden away" in the past, and so it's return is specifically the return, not just of any ol' dead kid, but of something that had better remained hidden. But the movie drops the ball here, as after a tasteless (read: wonderful) scene in which the frantic mother begins to tear the (inexplicably-provided) masks off of a number of retarded children on her lawn, searching for her son, but then never builds on that real breach of propriety and only gestures wholesomely towards the theme (of disturbing and creepy special needs kids) afterwards.

The Hitchcock moment is the recognition of the "social worker" in a different town altogether, on the street, just before the best shot in the film. It is truly unexpected and yet (for a split second) not at all "scary"--the street is well-lit, the woman is going about her business in a way we figure she has been for months, and she seems *not to recognize* "us" either.

About the ending: The Others, Dark Water, and this film all end the same way. The mother is "united" with her children in an afterlife of maternal bliss. The "real world" is escaped so that the fantasy can be carried on endlessly, spectrally. I do not see the cinematic or signifying appeal here; that could just be me.