At a glance, Guillermo del Toro might seem like a filmmaker with a split personality. One moment the Mexican-born director is cranking out big Hollywood blockbusters like Blade 2, Hellboy and Mimic. The next minute, he's cruising under the radar, coming up with exquisitely personalized art films such as The Devil's Backbone and its unofficial companion piece, Pan's Labyrinth.
The gap between these two poles basically turns out to be a nonissue, though, since a closer examination reveals all of del Toro's films, big and small, as part of a unified whole. His movies speak with varying degrees of subtlety, but each and every one is rooted in a boundless appreciation for fantasy, horror, and what the French, in their infinite wisdom, lovingly refer to as le cinema fantastique.
Del Toro isn't the director of The Orphanage, but he's officially listed as its producer and "presenter," and the guy's paw prints are all over the film. There's nothing too terribly fancy going on here, but all of the individual elements are tastefully chosen and imaginatively assembled, with a mood that's consistently dark and ravishing.
The end result is a relatively modest but beautifully crafted variation of a classic ghost story. The Orphanage is one of those conspicuously refined horror flicks that succeed through skillful manipulation of atmosphere and tension, continually delaying its big Boo Moments until it begins to seem like a cinematic equivalent of tantric sex. This is a movie that prolongs its suspense — and pleasure — indefinitely.
The actual director here is a first-timer named Juan Antonio Bayona, adding a smidge more fuel to the notion that no filmmakers today are as attuned to the supernatural as the Spaniards (although a few South Koreans have recently given them a run for their money). As in Alejandro Amenabar's equally classy and equally old-school The Others (another top-drawer spookfest by yet another talented Spanish auteur), The Orphanage takes place in the genre's ground zero — an old dark house that creaks and moans as if alive, its numerous, ominous nooks and crannies brimming with things that go bump in the night. Gothic secrets accumulate like some brooding, Spanish variation on Jane Eyre by way of The Turn of the Screw, and the only thing of which we can be certain is that nothing will turn out to be quite as it seems.
The movie establishes its ground rules from the outset, opening with the camera gliding so amiably about a group of frolicking children that we don't notice the nasty storm clouds gathering until the sky is ready to burst. The children turn out to be a group of orphans, one of whom, Laura (Belén Rueda), returns many years later to buy the titular structure in which she grew up — and where a host of imperfectly buried mysteries lie in wait, chomping at the bit to rise up dank and gnarly to the surface.
Laura and hubby Carlos (Fernando Cayo) move in to the sprawling old orphanage with their adopted son Simon (Roger Princep), a lonely, hyper-sensitive child with pale eyes, a mysterious illness and a penchant for long conversations with invisible friends.
This being the sort of movie it is, however, we fully expect that at least some of Simon's invisible friends will turn out to be more than figments of his imagination, and The Orphanage doesn't disappoint in this regard. The movie turns up its chilly heat by increments, borrowing an idea from del Toro's Devil's Backbone and suggesting that the ghost of a murdered orphan may be haunting the place. And then little Simon finds himself in harm's way, whisked away to some unseen space by kidnappers of supernatural origin.
All the while, Bayona's camera imbues even the most mundane scenes with eeriness and the possibility of disaster, even as a group of Down Syndrome kids in creepy Halloween costumes ripped from a Diane Arbus photo add to the vaguely grotesque undercurrent of surrealism lingering around the edges of the story.
The ectoplasm really begins to hit the fan at the three-quarter mark, when Laura comes to realize that diving head first into the spirit world may be her only chance of recovering her missing son. And so, making an entrance as iconic as Max von Sydow's, arrives the exorcist — in the form of a local medium named Aurora, played by Geraldine Chaplin.
It's worth remembering that Chaplin's famous face graced such notable Spanish films as 1976's Cría cuervos, a key influence on both The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. Her appearance in The Orphanage, though brief, is a crucial one, and seems to complete a specific cinematic circle in a neatly satisfying way.
Chaplin's appearance takes on a weight that belies its fleeting screen time in other ways as well. Besides getting all the best lines — "Seeing is not believing," says her character. "It's the other way around." — the actress is herself now the ghost of a ghost, a skeletal dead ringer for her famous father, Charlie, and her very presence helps drive home the movie's obsession with the past replaying itself endlessly. In The Orphanage, the living and the dead co-exist in some eternal Now of the subconscious, with no one ever really dying because it's all just a dream anyway.
I won't spoil the film's surprises, but it becomes easy to see the spectral children of The Orphanage as creepy extensions of the lost boys of Peter Pan, ageless entities perversely refusing to grow old, forever skulking through the darker side of eternal youth. Like so many ghost stories, this one is also very much a fairy tale, albeit one as open-ended as it is macabre, complete with its own elegant anti-logic and a Once Upon a Time prominently featured at the end. And even when the movie's meticulous rhythms occasionally falter, rest assured that there's a creepy ghost-kid with a burlap sack for a head waiting to snap us back to attention.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2008.