Major promise, minor delivery
‘The Orphanage’ a mediocre mélange of ‘Pan's Labyrinth’ and ‘The Devil's Backbone’
By Beth Capper
Published: January 4th, 2008 | 2:53pm
When Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) agrees to stamp his name on your movie, you know you've most likely made a hit. Good news for first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona then, whose spooky debut, The Orphanage, (El Orfanato) has Del Toro's name all over it. The Orphanage joins Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense in the creepy kids who see creepy dead-people genre.
The dead are housed in an archaic ex-orphanage ebbing the tides of the Spanish coastline. It's one of those houses that looks like it'll devour anyone who goes inside, but that doesn't deter Carlos (Fernando Caya) and Laura (Belén Rueda) from their dream of opening a home for the mentally handicapped there, along with their adopted son Simon. Laura chose the orphanage because she spent her childhood there before being adopted herself and remembers only happy times. But little does she know that some terrifying events took place after she left.
Things are going well until a woman named Benigna shows up, saying she's a social worker and asking too many unwanted questions about Simon. Laura promptly sends Benigna packing, only for her to appear a few nights later creeping around a tool shed in the orphanage garden. Around the same time, Laura's relationship with 7-year-old Simon worsens when he finds out he is both adopted and HIV positive. Simon has been talking about the "friends" he sees in their house for a while, but both Laura and Carlos write them off as imaginary. That is, until some fairly unexplainable happenings start to occur.
The Orphanage borrows a lot from other films — as well as Del Toro's name, you can also see his influence as some of Bayona's imagery recalls both Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone. Dario Argento is also heavily sampled as is The Omen. There are parts of the film that seem placed purely for their shock value, such as when Benigna gets hit by a truck and Carlos desperately attempts mouth-to-mouth, even though her face is split in half. These moments, while gruesome, are cheap. However, there are moments when Bayona does step up with some genuinely macabre scenes, particularly when Laura is trying to call on the ghosts of the dead children by re-enacting a lunch scene from the past. I'll never view blueberry pie in quite the same way again.
The Orphanage isn't a terrible film, but it is at best a mediocre one, and this is underscored greatly in the film's conclusion.
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