43. "The Orthanage" (2007, Bayona)
By Eivind Langdal
4th February 2010

Despite the fact that we all like to make fun of the horror genre and pigeonhole it, it is often more deceiving than what first appears to be the case. When watching The Orphanage, a Spanish horror film produced by Guillermo del Toro himself, I was reminded of a question that has been asked several times when it comes to the genre: what is most important – story or scares? Horror films usually emphasize the latter, which I am guessing has something to do with the fact that it’s easier to scare someone than it is to tell them a good story. After all, storytelling is a form of art. Scaring people requires no more skill than to sneak up on someone, grab their shoulder, and shout, “Boo!”

Of course, there’s more to scaring people than just shocking them. I said previously that storytelling is a form of art, but considering how many horror films there are, one could perhaps suggest that scaring people is a form of art too. Sure, it’s easy to make someone spill their popcorn on the person sitting in front of them, but to create tension, or to be more precisely, to build up to a scare; that takes skills that a surprising amount of horror directors do not possess. It was Alfred Hitchcock himself who best explained the difference between surprising people with a scare and creating tension: surprise is when a bomb under the table goes off, whilst tension (or suspense, if you will) is the bomb ticking, but not going off.

The bomb under the figurative table in The Orphanage ticks more often than it goes off. The film’s director, Juan Antonio Bayona, favors suspense before surprise. He also favors stories before scares, even though he confident enough in his own abilities to combine the two instead of eschewing one for the other. He succeeds with that. This is a horror film in the classic sense of the term. Think Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws, Carrie and The Exorcist. All those films were released in either the 60s or the 70s. All of them have good stories. All of them are suspenseful (though I’d go against popular opinion and say that Rosemary’s Baby isn’t actually all that much to fuss about).

On its release, the film became a large success in Spain, where it scored several awards. Though it wasn’t nominated for a best foreign language film at the Oscars, it was the country’s official selection for the award. Unsurprisingly, the rights for the film have been optioned for an American remake, which probably won’t be as good as the original, although it should be added that there is a possibility that it might, as the film itself is does not have a very typical Spanish feel (which is not meant as a criticism, but an observation). Its story feels universal. People all over the world can relate to it. Mothers especially.

The film stars Belén Rueda as Laura, a woman who grew up in an orphanage, was later adopted and moved away from it, and now has returned to it to live there and take care of children with special needs. Accompanying her is her husband, Carlos, and her adopted son, Simón, who is not aware of his ancestry or the fact that he is HIV-positive (and therefore bound to die before he gets very old). Laura and Simón have a playful relationship, and early in the film, he teaches her a game where one must follow clues to find a goal. The clues are all possessions of the person who is supposed to find the goal, and when they are all recovered, that person get to make a wish. Unfortunately, during one of these games, Simón discovers that he is adopted, which ends the playfulness in the relationship between he and his mother, and turns it into one of a more cruel nature.

Before they get the chance to make up, Simón mysteriously disappears. Laura thinks she sees him in a cave at a beach, but her husband feels reluctant to believe her. Still, after 6 months of Simón not showing up, he helps her when she insists that he can still be alive. To say that he his doubts about this would hardly be necessary (yet, for some reason, I still said it). Laura’s persistence culminates in her seeking the aid of a medium that specializes in ghosts. The medium brings two men with her who have the same interest, which results in one of the movie’s most brilliant sequences where the medium tries to contact the otherworld whilst the men monitor her with security cameras. As the medium comes closer to contacting the spirits of the house, a strange sense of dread starts to build. This is one of the many times in the movie where story and suspense go hand in hand, as our interest in finding out the true nature of Simón’s disappearance has to make room for our fear of what the medium might discover.

The Orphanage is a movie that, for a long time, requires us to be patient and wait for explanations that might or might not arrive. Thankfully, the story is compelling enough to get us to watch, and Rueda is so riveting as Laura that we don’t mind spending just about every scene with her. We feel for her. We want to find out the same things that she wants to find out. When her husband starts to doubt if her persistence is futile, we are on her side. Considering the fact that Laura’s mission requires a whole of bravery on her part, this is surprising. At times the movie is so scary that it made me doubt if I would be as persistent as Laura. I suppose parents who watch this film will not feel the same way as me. But still, I stayed with the movie to its two final scenes, where it sadly hits some of its few bum notes. The ending fails to live up to what has gone on before, which is a sad thing, because what has gone on before was something really worth watching. The two final scenes are worth watching too, but they were disappointing enough to turn my estimation of the film more down than it should be. Again, I suspect parents might feel different than me.