The Orphanage

A Spanish family decide to live in an abandoned orphanage with a tragic history. Presumably the other two properties on that edition of “To Buy Or Not To BuY”, were the disused insane asylum and the spooky converted roller-disco.

The Orphanage tells the story of Laura - a woman who returns to the orphanage where she lived as a child in order to set up a home for special needs children, but for whom things start going horribly wrong when her son’s imaginary friends suddenly start to increase in number and bat-shit insanity. Before she knows what happens, things begin to go crash in the night, weird “social workers” turn up out of nowhere (which is hardly a spoiler because come on… how many social workers in horror films turn out to be social workers. I’m guessing none), and an angry, violent child in a deformed scarecrow sack-cloth mask is stalking the halls.

What follows is a throw-back to old late 19th century style haunted house stories where ghostly children torment women in peril whilst their stoical doctor husbands stand by all stiff upper lip, and possibly fraudulant mediums (in this case Geraldine Chaplin being absolutely magnificent) do seances and float around diaphanously. Sure, there are modern trappings (AIDS, computers, televised appeals) but this is a resolutely old-fashioned horror melodrama and it’s all the better fot it, because it lends it that aura of “creepy by suggestion” that is apparently the cliche holy grail of film-critics when it comes to horror these days

Of course it’s not always subtle, and the two biggest shocks in the film (which come close enough together that I was worried for my heart) are homages to the two biggest horror movie cliches of recent years, but the ratcheting up of tension is such that the two girls sitting behind me were in complete pant-wetting hysterics by the last 20 minutes of the film, squealing and gasping in horror at everything that moved, and any horror film that manages that is doing something right in my book.

Of course I was in a constant state of nervous collapse throughout, but fun-fair ghost trains do that to me, so I’m not exactly a hard target.