The Orphanage: A really good, scary Spanish horror film

* * * 1/2 (out of 5)


(From the makers of Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone)

The old Universal horror films, like Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman were all 90 minutes each. They set up the story, introduce the creature, have him cause mayhem and have a resolution. Tidy. I'm not crazy about these movies, but I love their brevity. More movies should strive to come in around 90 minutes. Comedies and horror films especially because it is hard to sustain laughter and suspense much longer than that. Comedies start to drag and scary movies lose people's interest.

The Orphanage suffers from this. Coming in at almost 2 hours, it has too much filler to distract you before it gets to the good stuff. A girl of about 10 is adopted from an orphanage leaving all her little friends behind. 25 years later she and her husband buy the old building to make a home for sick kids. Her own son is not aware that he is adopted and sick, and starts to form some good relationships with imaginary friends, or are they? A mysterious old lady shows up to become a nanny, but offends the woman when she reveals information about her son that hardly anyone knows.

This Spanish-language film works on your nerves from about the third minute in. This is the kind of movie that makes you edgy even when you are watching something totally normal, like kids playing red light, green light 1-2-3. A few scenes made me jump out of my chair, but then there are some listless passages which almost put me to sleep. In fact, a key scene got past my sleepy eyes and is useful toward figuring out the ending.

I would have made more use of Charlie Chaplin's daughter, Geraldine, as a medium much like the Zelda Rubinstein character in Poltergeist, only without the humor. Geraldine speaks perfect Spanish as she is hypnotized and returns to the building's past.

I hope that some American filmmaker remakes this in English, since more people should experience it. A couple of critics had a problem with the ending, but I didn't. In fact I'm not sure what their problem was. At least there was some resolution which so many films lack nowadays.

The Freditor