Movie Review: El Orfanato (The Orphanage)
May 9th, 2008 by admin
- Director: Juan Antonio Bayona
- Genre: Horror/Thriller/Mystery/Drama/Foreign
- Year: 2007
Good horror films are hard to come by though, good horror, foreign films are much easier to find, which is a shame, because with the budget Hollywood has, the visual effects they can create would be the perfect instrument to deliver nice, scary, spine tingling films, but all they seem to churn out is the same old formulaic crap. Let’s be honest, when was the last horror film you saw that scared the crap out of you that was actually from the US? For me? I want to say that there is something I saw after Event Horizon that scared me, but all the examples I can come up with are European or Asian.
In any case, a foreign horror film is something I typically will jump right into simply because I know they are going to deliver something that I normally will not catch from the mainstream stuff. El Orfanato was no exception and the fact that it was presented by Guillermo del Toro only seemed to reinforce my faith in it. I had seen a couple of trailers, enough to make me shiver.
The idea here is that a woman and her family return to an now abandoned orphanage, with every intention of adopting a handful more kids, aside from their current adopted son, and look after them in that old mansion. it seems to Laura (Belén Rueda; Mar Adentro) that this is the perfect place to raise a few children, the way she once was as a child, near the sea and with plenty of ground to play in. However, when her child begins to insist on his new invisible friends, Laura begins to worry and yet, it takes the child’s disappearance to spur her into action, in a race to find him and uncover the veil of enigma that surrounds the entire grounds.
It is a solid horror flick with enough suspense to keep you watching with interest and good solid acting, even in the part of the children. All in all a solid plot, good cinematography, good usage of sound. The only thing that seemed up in the air was the ending, not a bad one, I do not think but it certainly sparked some discussion among the people that watched it with me. Definitely a watch!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Notes: Scary moments, frightening imagery, adult situations. Spanish with English subtitles