Top 25 Greatest Halloween Films: #13 – 'The Orphanage' (2007)

#13: The Orphanage (2007)

If forced to boil down to a single element just what it is that makes director Juan Antonio Bayona’s feature debut so special, it would be the presence of Belén Rueda in the lead role of Laura. There’s just something about casting the likes of a Kate Hudson-type in a horror film that always undercuts the heft of the story as well as the potential of the film’s raw emotional power – at least for me. Impossibly thin, forever-girl starlets lack plausibility as anything other than slasher-bait. Rueda, on the other hand, is a womanly woman possessing a Claudia Cardinale/Raquel Welch screen presence. She may be uncommonly beautiful but at 42 with some lines on her face, she’s also more accessible. You don’t automatically picture her walking out of a Beverly Hills Pilates salon holding a Starbucks latte. Whereas with so many of these forever-girls – no matter how hard the make-up department tries to bloody and dirty them up, you can never completely remove the phony Bel-Air sheen.

Now a married woman with an adopted child of her own (seven-year-old Simón), Laura purchases the large seaside estate that served as the orphanage she grew up in with the idea of reopening the place to care for special-needs children. Almost immediately, Simón picks up an imaginary friend named Tomas, who may not be all that imaginary. Over time, more mysterious pieces of a larger puzzle start to form, including a series of horrible murders, that won’t come completely together until after Simón mysteriously disappears and the inconsolable Laura determines to go to whatever lengths necessary to either find him or find out what’s happened to him.

After the mid-point, once the story really starts to boil, there are two unforgettably terrifying scenes, both of them set in the darkly cavernous and just plain spooky orphanage. One involves Geraldine Chaplin as a psychic brought in by the emotionally devastated Laura. She and her husband have been searching for Simón for months now and neither they nor the police have been able to come up with a single clue. The conceit of having us watch Chaplin’s psychic on security monitors as the darkly intense old woman moves throughout the house narrating what she sees and hears, adds a heightened level of creepiness and suspense you probably have to see to understand. The other scene comes later, after Laura’s reached a level of desperation only a mother could in such a situation. As a girl, Laura played a game similar to Marco Polo with the other orphan children. Alone in the dark house, she now hopes the game will bring those children back with the answer to Simón’s whereabouts.

The screenplay by Sergio G. Sánchez is much more than just a well-crafted ghostly mystery. This thoroughly engrossing story is also a rich and at times troubling character study of a woman dealing with the unthinkable. The final payoff, Laura’s final act, is a morally complicated one that does manage to make sense even though you never see it coming (well, I didn’t). This climax works as well as it does because Sanchez never stops driving his theme, one he establishes almost immediately and holds tight to throughout. This is a movie about the concept of motherhood and one woman’s need to care for unloved and abandoned children. Good things to be sure, but…

Every frame is beautifully composed, the production design’s flawless and director Bayona’s scene staging is impeccable. For a first-time feature director working in the toughest film genre to pull off successfully, still or moving, Bayona’s camera and actors are always in the exact right place. Guillermo Del Toro’s is the film’s producer and reportedly something of a mentor to the freshman director. But this teacher’s never made a film as good as his pupil.