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The Orphanage - A Review
Remember the days when horror films only tried to scare the shit out of you with some sort of monster? The set up was simple: monster/demon/psycho stalks and kills people until he/she/it was (usually) defeated by the hero.
Since The Ring, we have been deluged by horror films with complicated storylines and lots of prettified cinematography. Producer Guillermo Del Toro’s The Orphanage continues that unfortunate trend.
Don’t get me wrong - there’s still some good here.
The film stars Belen Rueda as Laura, a 37 year old woman who has recently purchased and moved into an old orphanage by the sea that she once called home. Laura has an adopted son named Simon who is HIV positive and also prone to talking to imaginary friends. Soon, these invisible friends make their presence felt, and after Simon goes missing, Laura’s sanity is put to the test in a desperate attempt to unravel the mystery of his disappearance.
First time director Juan Antonio Bayona uses a few interesting shots to add a layer of mystery and foreboding to the film. Added to that is the work of cinematographer Oscar Faura, who achieves a rich and deep palette of color, texture, and darkness. Unfortunately, Bayona has been watching American horror films (themselves all remakes) from the last five years, and smothers the film with innumerable tracking shots, all of which are perfectly composed and completely devoid of tension. When he decides to use handheld camerawork near the end, it causes a tonal shift that does not add to the horror of the proceedings.
The camera tricks and usual ghost story trappings are in service of a story that could have been quite tragic and desperate - several audience members gasped sadly at one late moment - except that even this effective scene is then undercut by a slightly upbeat and positive ending that feels slightly maudlin and not as clever as it wants to be. Before the ending, some scenes have a certain tension, yet lacking the genre requirement of overwhelming fear. Even a ghost story needs to be scary, not just unusual.
Another example of a horror film overthinking, The Orphanage fails to deliver its genre expectations, but does so with style and quiet confidence.
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4 Responses to “The Orphanage - A Review”
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two orphanage reviews across 2 different blogs…i’m scared
Why be scared?
This movie looked really scary, but I guess maybe I was wrong. I still might see it, but I don’t know if I can sit through a movie with sub-titles.
[...] recent double-whammy of watching The Orphanage and the release of a trailer for Doomsday has me lamenting the sad state of horror films these [...]