by Anthony Lane
Image caption: Belén Rueda as the mother in a Spanish horror story.
The New Year begins in fear and trembling. That, at least, will be the salutary experience of anyone who sees “The Orphanage,” the first film from the young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. He devotes himself to his small, shuddering tale with that blend of gusto and particularity—the near-pedantic wish to make the details lock and hold—which by tradition marks out the débutant. Indeed, “The Orphanage” is unblushingly traditional, one rule of horror movies being that there is nothing new under the moon. Rather than clutching at originality, Bayona, like any wise practitioner of the genre, seems happy to raise the dead—to bring fresh life to old tropes and buried images. If he chooses to film his main location, the orphanage of the title, from somewhere around rosebush level, craning upward to catch it at a looming angle, and so to conjure memories of the Bates house in “Psycho,” well, good for him.
The orphanage, which lies within running distance of the sea, is in fact an ex-orphanage, bought by Laura (Belén Rueda) and her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo). Their plan is to restore it to its former glory, providing a haven for disabled children—and a home for their own son, Simón (Roger Príncep), who does not know that he is both adopted and H.I.V.-positive. The unsettling thing is that Laura was raised in this same orphanage, before it closed down; at the start of the film, we see her as a child in its gardens, under a rain of thistledown, deep in a game of Grandmother’s footsteps. Why she should want to embark on such a project—whether she has exorcistic urges or is merely repaying a debt—is never clarified, and, as for the question of whether she would be judged fit to run an orphanage, it is barely raised. A scary movie, however, is meant to be infested with implausibilities, and what counts is whether we allow them to nip and needle us throughout or whether, as happens here, we learn to live with them, and even, perhaps, to relish their powers of suggestion. Is it the case, for instance, that Laura could not wait to revisit her old haunts, or could it be that, like the planet to which Ripley returns in “Aliens,” the place was waiting for her?
The house in Bayona’s film certainly makes all the right noises: creaks, moans, unheralded door slams—the full panoply of orchestrated dread. But who are the ghosts, if any, and what is their complaint? Simón, like most fanciful children, claims the companionship of invisible friends, and those absent figures grow every bit as present, and as pressing, as any of the living characters. Sometimes this is achieved through pure composition; down at the seashore, the boy is seen inside a cave, talking casually to someone just out of sight, obscured by a jutting wall of rock. His mother finds nobody there when she looks, of course, though she does find footmarks in the sand. This imprint of the spectral leads to a superb sequence at a children’s party, back at the orphanage, where the young guests wear masks. One of them, approached by Laura, turns nasty on her, blood is spilled, and the action quickens into panic. Simón gets lost, his parents race down to the beach once more, and the camerawork, hitherto as calm as a pool, is reduced to handheld jolts.
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You may be surprised to find “The Orphanage” becoming a missing-persons investigation, until you realize that what concerns Bayona is not a police procedural—the cops hardly intrude on the movie, and one thoughtful sniffer dog could have cracked the plot before it began—but a meditation on what it means to go astray. Simón is missing, presumed dead, although his mother fiercely believes otherwise, whereas someone like Tomás—his closest imaginary friend—is missing from view but presumed in some mysterious way to be alive. Moreover, the missing need not be the sponsors of terror; many children’s games, for example, depend on the secretive pleasure of vanishing, and “The Orphanage” is constructed like a long, intricate session of hide-and-seek, littered with tactile clues—a doorknob, a rag doll, an ice-cream wrapper, and a trail of seashells, like the pebbles and scraps of bread that Hansel and Gretel, already fearing their own disappearance, cunningly left in their wake.
Once Simón has been gone for half a year, and common sense proposes that he will not be seen again, his mother turns, more in determination than in despair, to those who are gifted with a sense of the uncommon. A team of paranormal inquirers comes to the orphanage, led by a figure clad in black, as slender as a child’s stick drawing, and as recognizable, even from behind, as anyone in cinema. Indeed, once she turns around, the eyes and mouth (still deep and wide, however drawn the skin) tug us back inescapably to what was, in its time, the most famous face in the world. In short, Géraldine Chaplin is still a Chaplin, and thus she arrives at this movie ready-haunted by the past. She plays a medium called Aurora, and the entire film revolves around a séance, conducted not with crystal spheres and levitating tables but with the trappings of the modern spiritualist—oscilloscopes, CCTV, and, best of all, the green, flaring hues of a night-vision display. Used to spooky effect by the goggled villain in “The Silence of the Lambs,” this becomes more daunting still under Bayona’s guidance. I was much taken—or, rather, mercilessly freaked out—by the way in which Aurora’s pupils gleam hotly in the jungle-colored darkness, like those of a nocturnal leopard, caught by a naturalist’s camera as it slinks to a watering hole.
One great virtue of “The Orphanage” is its surfeit of women. We have just crawled to the end of a lopsided year in which many of the most popular movies, as well as those which are now straightening their ties and preparing for the awards season, suffered a kind of female elision. I thought Kelly Macdonald worked hard, and stirringly, to fight her corner in “No Country for Old Men,” but in the end the movie found too little time for her, and, as for “American Gangster” and “There Will Be Blood,” you would struggle to remember a single female face amid the tough guys. The most prominent woman was Katherine Heigl, round-bellied from her drunken rumpus in “Knocked Up,” a film that under the cover of its filthy patter marked a dismal retreat, cranking back the cause of women—not so much their social or sexual status as their raison d’être—to a stage so primitive that Hollywood sought to outgrow it decades ago. Carole Lombard would have taken one sip of a film like that and tipped it down the sink.
“The Orphanage” will change nothing, but its casting choices span a cheering range. Films that attack our nerves tend to rely on nubility, providing sacrificial flesh even when there are no vampires on set, but Bayona bucks the habit. The women here are not on show, being far too busy mapping the emotional ground. Belén Rueda is in her early forties, majestic but dressed down for the leading role, with an air of bruised ripeness. In real life, she lost a child to heart disease, which may account for the gravity with which she shoulders the onscreen task of mater dolorosa. Then, we get Chaplin’s Aurora, Mabel Rivera as a police psychologist of tender but not inexhaustible patience, and Montserrat Carulla as the aging, thick-spectacled Benigna—a social worker, she claims, though since when did social workers return at night to make hammering sounds in your garden shed? In an Almodóvar picture, Carulla would offer dithering comic relief, but here she gets to deliver the two most disabling shocks in the movie, one on the heels of the other. This is a country for old women.
The confounding thing is that, although those moments caused me to react as if someone had wired my seat to a car battery, the lasting impression of “The Orphanage” is not one of fright. Instead, you exit the cinema in a fever of melancholia, wondering how long it will take you to shed the sensation of alarm. The film is less of a shocker than an adventure in anxiety, testing and twisting some of the classic studies in infantile curiosity. We see Simón reading “Peter Pan,” but when he talks about not growing old he doesn’t mean a divine, Edwardian promise of perpetual childhood. He means dying. To him, a lost boy is just another way of saying “ghost.” “If Peter Pan came to get me,” he asks his mother, as if she were Wendy, “would you come to Neverland to find me?” That makes it sound like an abduction. “The Orphanage” is more benign than cynical, in that it takes the love of mother and child to be the magnetic north of all human relations, yet it also peels away the innocence from its portrait of youth, brushing off the thistledown and replacing it with dank cellars, slapped cheeks, and a badly stitched sack over the head. The opening session of Grandmother’s footsteps is mirrored by another one at the close, with slightly altered rules: how would you care to play, for instance, if the hand reaching out toward you, at your back, did not belong to the living? I wish I didn’t believe such nonsense, but for a hundred minutes I found I had no choice. In the words of Aurora, “Seeing is not believing. It’s the other way round.”
Source: www.newyorker.com
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