London,

The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Juan Antonio Bayona. Cast: Belen Rueda, Roger Princep, Fernando Cayo, Geraldine Chaplin

 

Description: Doting mother Laura, who was raised in an orphanage, returns to the grand house of her youth with the intention of renovating the crumbling property as a home for disabled and disadvantaged children. Her husband Carlos and seven-year-old son Simon support her in this altruistic endeavour. Laura grows increasingly concerned about Simon, who seems to be more interested in his imaginary friend than the real world. Soon after, Simon vanishes without a trace, plunging Laura and Carlos into the midst of every parent's worst nightmare.

Country: MEX/SP. 2007. 105mins

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Ghost story with grit

 

Someone at the door: The Orphanage is as frightening as it is intelligent

Look here too

• Trailer: The Orphange
• Gore and giggles at The Cottage

It's good to see a new director who really knows how to make a movie work. Spanish director JA Bayona is shepherded by Guillermo Del Toro from the sidelines through a horror film-cum-ghost story that is at once frightening and powerfully intelligent.

The excellent Belen Rueda stars as Laura, a married woman who spent the happiest years of her childhood in an orphanage by the sea.

Now, some 30 years later, she returns with her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), and her small son, Simon (Roger Princep), to the now abandoned orphanage with the idea of reopening it as a home for disabled children.

When the boy starts to spin tales of other children who inhabit the building and play with him, his father thinks he is making a bid for attention.

But Laura begins to believe that the boy's fantastic tales bode ill. She is right, and the boy disappears.

There is nothing in this plot that's deeply original. But Sergio Sanchez's clever screenplay and Bayona's direction suggest that what the mother fears is quite as real as what we generally call reality.

Geraldine Chaplin appears as a medium who convinces Laura that something supernatural is afoot, and we find out that Laura's sensibility is the only thing standing between the family and breakdown.

The Orphanage builds its tension superbly and Rueda gives a tour de force of a performance. But it is Bayona who makes this admittedly tall tale stand up for inspection so cleverly.

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