Review of The Orphanage (2007) by Matt F — 26 Jun 2010

"The Orphanage" has won no less than thirty-one awards, including the rather reliable Grand Prize at the Gerardmer Film Festival (which has been awarded to such movies as "Dark Water", "A Tale of Two Sisters" and, more recently, "Let the Right One In".) It is indeed a beautiful film, which follows the well-established structure of haunted-house films such a "Poltergeist": a family are confronted to strange phenomena begging for a supernatural explanation, they call in a team of parapsychologists and mediums, but it belongs to them to deal with the supernatural beings.

The film is superbly shot in the really atmospheric orphanage of the title, but what I liked most about it was that unlike most ghost stories (including Guillermo del Toro's own "The Devil's Backbone"), it is not about vengeance and other evil intentions. on the contrary, like the aforementioned "Dark Water", it is about love, the love of a mother for her adopted child, or rather children. In fact, at its core, the film is not so much a horror film as a fairy tale - a scary tale indeed, like the pirate stories the mother tells her son, but one that is also explicitly molded on such classics as "Peter Pan.".

I expected the film to end with a twist, because that's the fashion these days: I was ready for something like the ending of "The Others", and in fact I even had my own theory which I thought was quite clever. But "The Orphanage" is not that kind of film. It does not try to trick its audience, but to tell a beautiful - if dark - story of compassion beyond the grave. And as its thirty-one awards testify, it does so quite successfully.