The Orphanage

by Ken Lowery

A masterful piece of horror from Spain, the best country on earth for that kind of cinema.

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Man, what a pleasure it is, finding a horror movie that understands dread. Merriam-Webster defines dread (the noun) as “great fear especially in the face of impending evil,” or “extreme uneasiness in the face of a disagreeable prospect.” “Impending evil,” “disagreeable prospect.” It’s the prospect of facing something, rather than actually facing the thing itself. Here’s where I start to sound like a bitter old cliché: American filmmakers have forgotten that dread is, in fact, the root of good horror. American horror instead focuses on the gratification rather than the build-up, and anyone with a sex life can tell you that someone focused only on that isn’t worth seeing a second time. But a filmmaker who knows how to coax and coerce you into greater fits of “oh please god no”? That is an infinitely more pleasurable experience.

The movie in question is The Orphanage, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, written by Sergio G. Sanchez, and produced and pushed by Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro is horror royalty, and he reached that lofty position by first creating compelling people and situations and extrapolating the horror from their lives. Bayona and Sanchez do as well, and so The Orphanage is like the best ghost stories: half thriller, half murder mystery. But in this kind of murder mystery, the victims are as dangerous as the murderer, and they don’t follow any rules you understand.

The Orphanage is about Laura (Belén Rueda), who lived in the stately old building in Spain as one child among a handful of special needs kids. She’s the lucky one that gets out, and years later, as a wife and mother of her own adopted child, she moves back in to provide the same merciful paradise she herself grew up in. But the orphanage – remote as it is, near the coastline with a long-dormant lighthouse nearby – has its own secret history, one Laura may never understand. At least not without sacrifice.

There’s a lot of homage work going on here, or at least a lot of notions and ideas I’ve seen used in other great ghost stories, from Poltergeist (you’ll know the scene) to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Another trait they all share is in acknowledgment of the permanence of locations; in a place where a building can stand for decades or centuries and change hands a dozen times, it’s the people who are brief and fleeting. The house stays; the house remembers.

Laura is a strong character. She’s a mother, as are so many female protagonists featured in haunted house stories, which neatly answers the one question that must logically arises when considering a haunted house. Namely: Why the hell don’t you just move away? Answer: My child is in danger. But Laura is as brave in the end as she is in the beginning; she knows her fear, but masters it. We believe her. That courage gives us enough to keep our eyes open during the unbearable.

And so, oddly enough, does the presence of her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo). Carlos is an actual presence in Laura’s life, not just a foil. I like it when a story acknowledges that adults have complex relationships and people they rely on, and that going it alone is unusual, especially in times of uncertainty or danger. Horror movies almost universally do everything they can to isolate the protagonist from the outside world; in an age of cell phones and GPS, the deus ex machina of outside help can too easily spoil the helplessness most storytellers rely on to generate fear. But Laura does what anyone would do in her situation: She turns to the authorities, then to paranormal investigators, and all the while she leans on her increasingly skeptical husband. When she finally must face the old orphanage alone, we know why. This story is about her and only her, in ways even she doesn’t know.

The pace of The Orphanage will throw some people. Horror is perhaps the most nakedly musical film genre, relying on steady beats to lull its audience in for maximum effect. If you’ve seen a lot of slasher movies, you know exactly what beats I’m talking about; it’s how you know exactly when the Bad Thing is going to happen to the Hapless Teenager. The Orphanage’s beat is slower, but its rewards are far richer as a result. It’s nice when someone chooses to build a symphony instead of another pop song.