AKA: El Orfanato
DVD review (region 1)
Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona
Starring Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep
Release date 22 April 2008

Laura (Rueda) returns to the orphanage in which she grew up, along with her husband Carlos (Cayo) and adopted son Simon (Príncep). At first Simon’s talk of his new ‘friends’ seems to be just the work of an over-active imagination. But when Simon mysteriously disappears, Laura starts to believe the place may be home to ghosts…

With the J-horror cycle becoming ever more ridiculous (The Wig anyone?) and Hollywood wasting its time with inferior remakes, it seems to have fallen to the Spanish to push the limits in screen terror. If jittery zombie flick [Rec] was about as contemporary as horror movies get, The Orphanage is a far more traditional affair – but no less unsettling for that.

Juan Antonio Bayona directs with such an assured hand it’s difficult to believe this is only his first outing behind the camera. Like ghostly greats such as The Haunting or, more recently, The Others, Bayona succeeds at telling a slow-burning but gripping ghost story while delivering on bona fide scares – Laura’s game of ‘One-two-three knock on the wall’ is almost unbearably tense, while the movie contains the best medium-contacting-spirits-sequence since Poltergeist.

The movie never becomes as dark and disturbing as you might initially suspect – this is closer to producer Guillermo Del Toro’s more classical The Devil’s Backbone than his downbeat fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. In fact, there’s a theme of childhood innocence and magic running through the film, most noticeably in its frequent references to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, which Bayona manages to pull off without becoming cloying. Presumably, Hollywood must be pounding on Bayona’s door by now.

The DVD includes the standard collection of interviews and 'Making of' material. Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 8/10
A confident and atmospheric picture that is all the more effective for its unhurried pace.