With much critical acclaimed and awarding winning director Guillermo del Toro behind his back, first time director Juan Antonio Bayona can’t get sloppy when it comes to making good cinema. And Bayona doesn’t with his first feature produced by Guillermo del Toro, the director of such films as Pan Labyrinth’s and Hellboy.
Written by Sergio G. Sanchez, the script was for the most part inspired by 70’s horror films, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Neverland’s Peter Pan. The storyline is pretty conventional with plot twists that can be seen in any horror films for the past few decades, but the emotional cadence that pervades the film seem to make up for the strictly static spooky atmosphere.
Plot of The Orphanage
Maternal anguish, guilt, and betrayal are among some of the stronger emotions being played out in this drama-filled horror film. Laura, (Belan Rueda), returns with her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and son Simon back to live in the orphanage she grew up in. Simon, a precocious child is the first to discover that the house has uninvited guests. With two already known imaginary friends, his parents think nothing of it once he acquires one more to his tribe of “invisible friends”.
But after the disappearance of her son, Simon, Laura was not too thrilled to find out that her past at the orphanage was coming back to haunt her. She goes on a quest to find her son, but with obstacles such as long winding treasure hunts, a ghost child parading with a gunny sack over his head named Tomas, and with the threat of the break up of her marriage, Laura finds out that it might be too late.
A Chilling Scene…and Many More to Come
With slow camera movements, eerie music, and dazzlingly shoots, be sure audiences will be popping out of their seats and often. With such predecessors as The Sixth Sense and The Others, The Orphanage certainly has its own stylistic impulses. A certain scene where famous Spanish actress Geraldine Chaplin plays, Aurora, a medium who explains to Laura that once “something terrible happens it leaves a trace…A wound that acts as a knot between two times….It’s like an echo wavering again and again waiting to be heard” Listening to such lines will give audiences chills not too much unlike the ones we get in such scenes where Laura plays a game of Stop and Go with the ghost children. It’s eerie scenes like this where we begin to feel for Laura’s maternal instincts—of how far she will go to find her son. All parents or even those without children will feel for the characters on screen, something Bayona definitely succeeds in.
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