Review of The Orphanage (2007) by Albert D — 05 Jun 2010

The uninspired movie for people who think they are cool and hip by liking foreign movies. This movie is a bad tasting stew made with ingredients from far superior movies, and every once in a while while watching this boring turd, I kept thinking "I wish I were seeing one of those instead".

First, to all ignorants out there, this film was not directed by Guillermo del Toro, who has not that many credits under his belt to pull a Spielberg. The act of good will of acting as Executive Prducer by using you name to push the movie of a lesser known director with talent is a feat reserved to few film makers, and del Toro is not yet one of them.

This movie was directed by first time Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona, and his opera prima is flawed to the brim. I don't see why, or no, let me rephrase, I do see why he needed del Toro's name to sell this movie, cause without the name, I don't think any distributor would have bought it.

The main flaw with this movie is the flaw of most, if not all scary movies of today, it's a classic case of "been there, done that, and a million times better". Every single concept handled in the movie has been handled before, in far superior movies like Poltergeist, which was written by Spielberg, or The Sixth Sense by M. Nigh Shyamalan, and The Others by Alejandro Amenabar. Hell, the movie even rips off Friday the 13th, and even goes to the point of ripping off Peter Pan, this movie has Poltergeists, a Jason, children ghosts that only one person can see, you name the scary movie, The Orphanage found some weird cheap way to package it, then adds very similar elements of Pan's Labyrinth at the end, and hopes everyone will be too much of an idiot to be sucked into the cheap thrill moments. The movie relies on the shock, high modulated surprise music cue way too much, a thing that pisses me off tremendously, cause once you've used it, no matter how much depth of field shots you can include, the energy is out, and the movie is running on fumes. Not even Jaws, a classic of the thrilling genre uses the high pitch music cue in it's big thrill moment where Roy Scheider is "gonna need a bigger boat".

The sort of 1+1=2 method of this movie gets so boring that, within 15 or 20 minutes of film, you pretty much figure out the entire thing, and you have to sit through until it unfolds slowly in a very boring fashion. I hate when thrillers become predictable, cause they stop being thrilling, and that is the case of The Orphanage, cause it is predictable by doing everything that has been done in movies about haunted houses and children, only with less flare, less style, and certainly less greatness.

The movie is terribly written, terribly directed, and also, does some pretty stupid casting choices. I mean, I love Edgar Vivar, I think that as every person of Latin America born from 1965 onwards, we count El Chavo as one of our most important childhood programs, and Vivar as Senor Barriga was funny as hell, but when he is supposed to be a guru of the occult, that just doesn't work, when he started talking about the ghosts everyone laughs, cause it just doesn't work at all, and getting Geraldine Chaplin to pull the trick of using a funny person as the seance, just like Zelda Rubinstein's Tangina in Poltergeist was flat down boring, you kept thinking, why is Mrs. Chaplin trying to copy Zelda Rubinstein?

The end of the movie also leaves something to be desired, the movie, no matter how much it tried to trick the audience into thinking it was a serious movie, they just could not stick with the sad ending, they had to give a positive, cheerful note at the end, just in case people get too disturbed, let's kill the little dark overtone of having a boy with AIDS, I can see the producers and Bayona, "let's give it a Pan's Labyrinth touch, that worked last year right?".

The movie also makes the stupid cliche of having the protagonist discover the most retched, scary places imaginable, and well, obviously, she is going to go in, alone, with out a flashlight, cause if she doesn't, the movie can't be scary, and just when it gets too scary, someone walks in and saves the day, just at the nick of time, well sure, cause if no one saved the protagonist from a heart attack, the movie would be over, an that is too much to hope for.

Not to mention some incoherent elements like a woman mistaking red haired little girls for her brunette boy, and a mysterious and tool like character that makes no sense, has no beginning, and no end, and only works for comedy and terror and to tie in a plot hole.

Aside from creating a convincing looking set, the movie really has nothing worth mentioning, or remembering, cause I already could mention and already remembered all the things that happened on this movie, from other, better movies.

This is the epitome of uninspired cinema, and it's a shame that just cause del Toro put his name in it, distributors and audiences were suckered in on it.