Review of The Orphanage (2007) by Chads. — 12 Jan 2008

Simon(Roger Princep) is HIV-positive, which serves as a metaphor, I think, for the aesthetics of the way this filmmaker reworks the horror genre to his liking. We expect blood, but "The Orphanage" is nearly bloodless.

Using AIDS as an analogy: If somebody with the virus bleeds, there's a fear of being infected. Just the very idea of an infected person shedding tainted blood scares us. After years of sitting through so many American horror films(mostly bad), we've been conditioned to expect arterial sprays, red drippings, or some manner of spectacular bloodletting.

As it turns out, nobody spills an ounce of blood in "The Orphanage", but the film manages to induce an anxiety about some death rendered in grisly detail. Simon is representative of this filmmaker's sensibilities.

The young boy doesn't have to bleed to scare the bejesus out of us. "The Orphanage" takes a page out of the "Poltergeist" handboo-(make the horror twofold; human(an abducted child) and supernatural(ghosts)- with cribnotes from "The Blair Witch Project"(black screen, the human face in fearful repose), and god help us all, Steven Spielberg's worst title from his filmography.

Most impressive of all is how the ghosts don't flicker, or fade away; they're either corporeal or suggested. "The Orphanage" is cerebral, but by no means is it a deconstruction of the genre.

In the film's last ten minutes, you get the raw emotion of Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" and the Spielbergian uplift of "Kick the Can"(the second segment from "The Twilight Zone: The Movie").

Pretty cool, huh.