When will developers learn — we need to stop building on ancient burial grounds
If you’re worn out on Japanese ghosts brandishing faces full of wet hair and blank eyeballs, or loud, glitzy CGI haunted houses that chop people in half, you’ll welcome Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage, a truly creepy ghost story that doesn’t turn on shitty gimmicks or cyclonic special effects. Instead, Bayona co-ordinates a good story with a subversive touch of ambiguity, solid performances and an eerie atmosphere that builds tension from the very first frame. Why other directors haven’t thought of this, I’m not really sure.
Belén Rueda stars as Laura, a doting mom who, along with her husband (Fernando Cayo), buys the orphanage where she spent part of her childhood and where she intends to establish a school for special-needs children. Upon arriving at the remote coastal manor, her son Simón (Roger Princep) strikes up an “imaginary” friendship that at first seems odd but benign.
Simón soon confronts his mother with secrets she has been keeping from him, things he has no way of knowing. When Simón disappears during the school’s open house — and Laura has a nasty run-in with a gruesome kid in a sack-cloth mask — Laura starts to suspect that restless spirits within the orphanage have claimed her son. Her husband and the cops are skeptical about her theory, as you might expect, but Laura is determined to do whatever she must to bring her son back.
The film turns on Rueda’s powerful lead performance as the distraught but resourceful mother who is both utterly terrified of and undaunted by the unseen forces that plague her. First-time feature director Bayona expertly assembles the other elements that lend The Orphanage its sombre atmosphere and sustained tension, not just in the particulars of lighting, camerawork and sound design — which are exemplars of subtle ghost-storytelling — but in his patient construction of a convincing domestic setting that slowly but steadily goes awry.
What’s more, Bayona refrains from cheap jolts, carefully choosing his moments to make you jump out of your seat so as not to disrupt the carefully wrought mood. Nor does he tip his hand as to whether Laura is beset by real ghosts or an elaborate emotional hell of her own making, an ambiguity that only deepens the troubling emotions and universal fears underpinning the story.
If all this sounds too cerebral to be scary, fear not. Or rather, fear plenty: there are lots of dark corners, hidden rooms and repulsive imps, along with a long, creepy sequence in which a frail, dotty medium named Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin) communes with the orphanage’s ghostly residents. It’s just the sort of thing to raise hairs at the back of your neck, if they haven’t already been blunted by the bombast of mainstream horror movies.
It’s too early to tell, but it’s nice to think that Bayona might join his countryman Alejandro Amenábar and Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro (who seems to do his best work in Spain) in restoring some dignity and depth to the ghost story. The Orphanage is certainly a spooky step in the right direction.
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