FEBRUARY 8, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 1

I don’t pay much attention to the names behind any film I watch, and I try not to let a personality guide my watching choices. But when Guillermo del Toro’s name was breathed somewhere in relation to it, I needed nothing more to convince me to go see El Orfanato (The Orphanage), because Pan’s Labyrinth was my favorite film of 2006. After learning during the opening credits that not Toro, but Juan Antonio Bayona, directed the film, I felt a little suckered; I had let the infamous cult of celebrity so ruthlessly exploited by those notoriously manipulative foreign film distributors hook me in!

Well, maybe I didn’t get quite so indignant. However, my excitement indeed dimmed.

Horror needs rules. The genre’s main themes are anarchy, chaos, and mayhem, but its stories can’t work unless there is something underneath it all. I don’t mean the conventions of the genre—virtually all modern horror filmmakers are exhaustively versed in every variation of every scary scenario. Ask any backyard digicam auteur of slasher flicks what his inspirations were and he will recite an encyclopedia of gore and shocks and frights. The oft-missing element is a cohesive and consistent underlying mythology, especially in stories dealing with the supernatural. Any movie can throw moody lighting over a guy with an ax and stick him underneath the stairs as the protagonist plods down into the basement, or create ghostly apparitions. It takes a well-thought-out structure to the film’s world to create a really lasting sense of fear and dread, my favorite example being Jacob’s Ladder which, for all its chaos, has an achingly simple rationale at is core.

This is the main strength of El Ofranato. It certainly has its creepy chops on the surface: Belén Rueda plays Laura, who moves her husband and son to the small orphanage she grew up in, planning to open a renovated foster home. Soon after they arrive, the son Simón, played by Roger Princep, starts acting bizarrely and, after Laura is attacked by a ghost, disappears. The story spans the months after the disappearance as Laura comes to believe the ghosts in the orphanage may have taken Simón. Throughout the course of the plot, we learn which ghosts are who and some of the history of the orphanage; the “rules” of behavior which govern what goes on around the home. Almost refreshingly, the place was not home to any sort of gruesome, mad-scientist orphan-consuming experiments or satanic orphan sacrifices, but instead to ordinary, (somewhat) innocent, childish bullying of a “deformed” boy.

This deformed boy creates a sort of red herring in the story. Along the course of the story, Laura believes the ghost of the boy, angry because of the bullying it suffered in its life, has kidnapped her son. Her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) stands by her as she becomes more and more obsessed, sometimes gently playing along with the sad eyes of someone who is watching madness. At one point, Laura invites a cadre of supernatural mediums to perform an appropriately spooky séance, which is as atmospheric and ultimately unhelpful as the movie-séance cliché demands. At the climax of the story, Laura is convinced the only way to bring her son back is to recreate the orphanage as it was in her childhood; the way when her friends, the ghosts, were alive.

Her logic is accurate, and it prompts a ferociously chilling scene in which Laura plays a sort of unearthly “red light, green light” game with supernatural children. This was the point where I decided the film was worth seeing on the big screen; the kids inch closer and closer from the back of the frame right up to the foreground, in an agonizing series of halted steps. But this isn’t the full source of the film’s beauty, the way Laura’s intuitions about the conventions of the supernatural in her world; it’s also the way the rules are rendered meaningless. We feel, right along with Laura, that the ghosts have taken young Simón because we have seen the frigging ghosts for christ’s sake! In the superb blending of otherworldly fantasy and real-world misery, a secret cellar is uncovered, and in it, Laura finds Simón wrapped in a blanket at the foot of the stairs. An emotional reunion occurs, but the supernatural aura fades and the cold, hard truth hits Laura, and us, in the face: Simón had accidentally become trapped in the cellar months before, tumbled down the stairs, and died alone on the stone floor. It’s cruelly mundane, simple, ugly, and heart-wrenching. Laura’s metaphysical horror is replaced by an unbreakably simple anguish.

So, did Laura, and we, spend the entire film trying to understand the ghosts of the orphanage in vain? Were the intrigues of generations-old scandal and mystery a diversion, or cheap ploy to sustain the frights throughout act two? Much like Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s the similarities and contrasts between the two parallel universes that accentuate the humanness between them. In the film’s final moments, Laura finds a way to stay with Simón forever, similar, again, to the ending in del Toro’s last film. Maybe it’s the nature of the callous human world and the realm of fantasy that the only bridge between them is death.