The Orphanage

It is the first film from the library of NDTV Lumiere, which had a platform release in India on 30th May, in PVR cinemas across the country. It is in Spanish with English subtitles. The film has been directed by Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona and presented by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan’s Labyrinth won Oscars for best cinematography, art direction, and make-up.

The Orphanage uses all the known ploys of the horror and supernatural genre, and is obviously designed to spook the audiences. The story is set in a small seaside town, in an old grey-colored manor, which used to be an orphanage earlier. It has long corridors and dark nooks and crannies; the sky in the area is perpetually covered with grey clouds. The Sun never shines in this place. The clouds get darker as the plot thickens, another motif oft used by every Tom, Dick, and Harry among horror-yarn weavers.

The film revolves around a little girl Laura who is given in adoption by the orphanage. After she grows up, marries, and becomes a mother, she decides to move into the empty manor with her doctor husband Carlos and seven-year-old son Simón who is HIV positive. She has plans to start a residential nursery for mentally challenged kids to repay the debt of kindness she had received there as a child.

After having created this setting, the director brings in his panoply of predictable tricks – a masked apparition, creaky doors that keep banging all the time, sudden appearance of an old matron with thick glasses, disappearance of Laura’s son who sees things and can communicate with ghosts in ‘the sixth sense’ sort of way, eerie sounds of invisible children crying and pleading for help, arrival of a ghastly medium (Geraldine Chaplin) along with an ultra-tubby psychic, a husband who refuses to believe his wife, outhouse bakery with ovens stuffed with sacks filled with ashes and bones, little handmade dolls hidden in covert cavities, dark underground basements with secret doors, etc., etc.

The audience is taken on a familiar trail of discovery of the sinister and horrible deeds that had taken place in the orphanage and had left a whole lot of restless and wandering souls behind, who wish their story to be known somehow. It begins with the HIV-positive son of Laura. He starts seeing ghosts and playing games like treasure hunts with them. It is probably because he is on the verge of dying himself. He tells Laura about these invisible friends but she does not believe him. She realizes the import of what her son was trying to tell her after he disappears on the day the nursery is expected to be inaugurated. She tries to convince her husband Carlos that the invisible ghosts of the manor have abducted their son. They also take the help of a psychic and a medium to find their son out. Laura’s husband Carlos refuses to believe her and decides to leave the manor. Laura stays on to discover the ghosts of her past. She also finds her son in the end. But, by then, she herself has turned into a ghost…

It is one more archetypal representative of the horror flick genre and offers nothing new artistically. It has a whole lot of loose ends in its contrived and convoluted screenplay. Yet it is eerie and scary and thus serves its storytelling objectives well. It is not a breakthrough film like The Blair Witch Project. However, it is spookier than RGV’s Bhoot.

Here is an important piece of information. Though NDTV Lumiere promises to bring us the best of world cinema, The Orphanage does not fulfill that promise even by a long shot. It is just a horror film, the way they generally are, in the Spanish language with English subtitles. And be further informed, contrary to PVR’s misleading advertisements in newspapers and the tag line in its brochure and advertisement, The Orphanage is not an Oscar-nominated film. It is merely presented and produced by Guillermo del Toro whose other film Pan’s Labyrinth was nominated as well as awarded by the Academy.

RKS