Most horror movies are so dismal and unimaginative — especially right now, with the "torture porn" movement in full swing — that critics have a tendency to go overboard when they encounter one that demonstrates even a modicum of suggestiveness and restraint. Case in point: The Orphanage, an elegant Spanish chiller that's been amassing superlatives ever since its premiere at Cannes last spring. So lovely and lyrical is the film's opening shot — a group of small children playing a stop-and-go variant of tag, with the pursuers advancing a few menacing steps at a time — that few seem to have noticed that the remainder amounts to little more than the usual grab-bag of cheap shock effects and pro-forma eerieness, plus subtitles.
As it turns out, that kid-filled vision of the titular orphanage is merely a prelude. Many years later, one of its former inhabitants, Laura (Belén Rueda), returns to the now-abandoned building with her husband (Fernando Cayo) and young son (Roger Príncep), planning to turn it into a home for disabled children. No points for guessing that the place is already occupied by little folks with the particularly arduous handicap of being long-deceased. The boy, Simón, who is HIV-positive and requires daily medication, quickly adds half-a-dozen newcomers to his long-established pair of imaginary friends, then mysteriously vanishes, not long after Laura has an encounter with a strange, snuffling childlike figure wearing a burlap scarecrow mask. The police conclude that Simón must have run off and drowned in the nearby ocean, but Laura refuses to believe that he's dead, retreating from her husband and the real world into the paranormal.
Rueda's fine performance, which staggers back and forth across the murky border dividing "hardy soul open to the impossible truth" and "bereaved mother gone insane with grief," lends The Orphanage a texture and subtlety that's too frequently belied by screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez and first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona. Sánchez tends to simply assign his characters whatever emotion is necessary for any given moment, so that (e.g.) Simón abruptly becomes angry and abusive at the end of a game in which he's been giddy and playful, even though he already knew the information that ostensibly sets him off. And Bayona resorts to all manner of booga-booga cliché, including the tired old dead-person-suddenly-grabs-you routine. The Orphanage is eminently watchable, and has its share of genuinely unsettling moments (including a marvelously creepy reprise of the opening tag sequence), but you'll have a better chance of enjoying its modest virtues if you dial your expectations down a little. — Mike D'Angelo
