Review of The Orphanage (2007) by Steve M — 05 Jul 2011

Seeming as the vast majority of horror film's coming from what once was the country that mostly excelled at it "'America", are mostly all remakes/reboot's or un-original and just overall crappy horrors nowadays Foreign producer "Guillermo del Toro", Writer "Sergio G. Sanchez and Director "Juan Antonio Bayona" teamed up to make this fantastic modern-day take on the classic "Ghost Story". This is a wonderful film, as soon as I saw "Del toro" was part of this I knew it wasn't gonna dissapoint and seeming as I love horror I really needed to see one of the few highly acclaimed one's in recent years. It's not just a straight-up horror as it mixes it with Drama,Mystrey & Suspense and somewhat Fantasy.

So this basicly follows the story of a woman named "Laura" who was a former orphan. Her and her husband are raising adopted son "Simon" in the former orphange where "laura" grew up, "Simon" doesn't know he's an orphan at first but soon somehow finds out. We soon find that "Simon" has five imaginary friends or is actually seeing ghost's at first we aren't sure ofcourse she thinks the only explanation is the simple fact that it's all just products of the boys imaganation. "Laura" soon decides to reopen the orphanage to cater for disabled children so they soon throw a party. At the time of this party "Simon" is sure he see's something in a friends cabin and tries to get "Laura" to take a look but shes too busy and doesn't give it much thought. Later on that day she see's a boy wearing a mask and then realizes "Simon" has dissappeared. "Laura" soon feels the presence of other people in this house and obviously she's either dillusional from the obvious trauma of loosing her son or the answer is something else. After months of trying to come to terms with what's happened she finally decides to invite a team of parapsycholologists to help her to unravel this mystery. That's all i'll say but the film does indeed begin to engage you in suspense throughout and creates a very entertaining mystrey.

As far as horror goes all fans have seen plenty of them revolving around the subject matter being "Ghost's" it's hard to think another one can possibly be made, that's unless ofcourse it was put into the right hands. It indeed was, the film seemed similar to some of those i'd allready seen but still felt extrememly unique and it had some ideas of it's own and the story and the way it was executed was highly intruging it's truly a must-see for horror fans or well anyone looking for a spectacular piece of modern-day cinema. The film is very well directed the stratgeic controllive work of "Sergio G. Sanchez" fit's the mood of the film pefectely and alot of the story is told from pointers he's giving you. The cinematography was beatiful to look at and it created a very errie atmosphere. The performence's were solid by the whole cast but the most praise goes directely too the actreess who played "Laura"(Belen Rudea), she is belelivable in every aspect when trying to fight through the confusion and stress of solving this very mystrey, she played it so well that you were right there with her hoping his whereabouts would atleast be explained .

I wouldn't say this film scared me but it was highly entertaining and once the tension strated it didn't fail to continue to pick-up the film truly worked in the same way even some of the classic "Ghost" horrors did and even suprassed some of the most well-known ones. I must say whilst I did think this was fantastic and whilst I liked it alot I defintiely didn't think it was perfect and I had atleast a few problems with it. The thing with old-school aka the best horrors is they usually relied on nothing but pure suspense and the realistic portrayl of the characters to engae and scare us but while this did manage to pull that off it still seemed to display some of the new typical attributes found in modern-day horror which I hate. For example every horror scene seemed to have to have a loud musical-chord or just some loud bang of some sort which is suppose to give you a fright or make a certain scene scarier but to me that kinda ruins a scene and can make it just seem stupid I must say though there were some highly original horror scenes in here which i'm sure i'd never seen before and they are very inventive. So yea eventhough it brought me back memories of classic horror it was still packed with a few of the typical clitches found today but did manage to thankfully avoid most.

I must say the ending to this film was just spectacular and completely unexpected, very imaginative indeed I won't give it away ofcourse. But yea all in all I highly reccomend this one, a great horror of our time but just not on the very level of a masterpiece...