Oct 112007
 
two reels

Laura (Belén Rueda) returns to the now-abandoned orphanage where she was raised, planning to reopen it for special needs children. The area seems to have an odd effect on her son, Simón, who picks up a lot of imaginary friends, one of whom tells him he’s adopted and HIV positive. When Simón disappears, the police suspect a kidnapping, possibly related to the strange old woman who tried to pass herself off as a social worker, but Laura suspects ghosts: Dead children have taken her son and are now playing a game with his life.

It’s as if we’ve all been invited to Guillermo del Toro’s slightly less talented younger brother’s bar mitzvah. But the new guy is still clutching to his older siblings leg…and plot. If you’ve been knocking yourself out trying to figure what to put between The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth on your DVD shelf, this is your lucky day (well, it will be when The Orphanage is released on disk). It feels like del Toro, it sounds like del Toro, and it looks…well, pretty good, but not quite as good as del Toro.

Music video director J.A. Bayona got a producing and inspirational boost from the previously mentioned del Toro, allowing him to make an often scary, horror fantasy. Like The Devil’s Backbone, it takes place in an orphanage and involves the ghosts of children and a past tragedy. Like both The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, the supernatural elements could be real or everything could be explained naturally. And, again like  The Devil’s Backbone, the story drags in the middle and the major characters are underdeveloped, distancing, or irritating, and behave in often unbelievable ways.

What The Orphanage has that it can call its own are some nice frights. The preview theater was filled with screams and uncomfortable laughter. It was a bit much for my taste, with everything that happened on screen accompanied by blaring music or crashing sound effects. The twelfth time the big scare was nothing more than a door swinging in the breeze, I began to check my watch. Still, I shouldn’t get to critical; most horror movies have no scares. If most of those in The Orphanage turned out to be connected to trivial matters, that’s still better than none at all.

I feel less compulsion to be civil about the “is it a ghost or is it a fantasy?” storyline. This has been done far too many times, and while it may be the current darling of the art house crowd, it leaves me cold. I’m stuck watching scene after scene where the protagonist’s sanity is questioned, and since the filmmakers want it both ways, no answer means a whole lot. I suppose that would have been easier to take if I liked her or cared about her son. Bayona and company do nothing to make that happen. They just assume the viewer will sympathize with a mourning mother and get on with making loud thumping noises. Well, I’m more cold-hearted than that, at least when it comes to cinematic mothers.

At least Laura has a character, even if its one of little interest. Her poor husband is the real ghost of the film, floating in and out of scenes with nothing to do. I have to wonder if they decided to cut him out of the script (a clever decision) and then never finished the re-write.

I’m dwelling on the negatives, while hardly mentioning the positives (acting, cinematography, even the predictable but fun mystery) because the positives don’t help; they just raise my level of frustration.  I hate it when quality work is wasted. I left the theater disappointed, and I suspect, so will you.