Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
It's
All in Your Head
(The Orphanage, 3/17/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Dread
scary movies? Still prefer to shut that closet door before going to
sleep? Then stay the hell away of Juan Antonio Bayona's seriously creepy
The Orphanage.
First, a short digression. In many
ways, Hollywood's obsession with special effects has killed its ability
to make the kind of genre movies the effects would supposedly enhance—fantasies,
monster flicks, supernatural thrillers. The reason is depressingly familiar:
when anything can be accomplished on film with CGI, nothing is surprising.
It's not just old school carping to assert that some things are best
left to the wetware between our ears. After all, the imagination produces
"special effects" that are necessarily custom-made for every
viewer, and therefore about as wondrous or scary as anything can be,
well, imagined.
Enlisting the viewer's brain as
a collaborator is not only smart-it's cost-effective. Many of the truly
creepy movies of the past, such as The Haunting (1963), Rosemary's
Baby (1968) and even The Exorcist (1973) and The Blair
Witch Project (1999) owe most of their chills to nothing more than
clever editing, sound effects, and the occasional quick glimpse. That
is, they owe their power not to silicon, but to celluloid.
The Orphanage is an immaculately-crafted
throwback to these old virtues. It's a pure haunted house story—married
couple Laura and Carlos (Belén Rueda and Fernando Cayo) with
an adopted, HIV-positive Simon (Roger Príncep) take over an abandoned
orphanage where Laura spent her own childhood. Laura, of course, comes
to sense that the family isn't alone in the house. Simon is talking
to a bevy of new "imaginary friends," and there are bumps
in the night that can't necessarily be blamed on old plumbing.
When Simon disappears one day without
a trace, and stays missing for six months, his mother comes to sense
he never left the house at all. Carlos the hyper-rational physician
doesn't get it, of course—he wants to get out immediately. It's
a testament to the film's effectiveness that the viewer feels no urge
to roll the eyes when Laura elects to stay in the house alone, to continue
the search. A woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do.
Superficially, The Orphanage
might be compared to other recent creepfests involving children and
the supernatural, such as The Ring, The Sixth Sense, and
The Others. Bayona's film has a lot more heart than any of these,
however, thanks in large part to the script by Sergio Sánchez,
which skillfully touches on themes of loss and guilt—in other words,
things adults dread as much or more than children do. Together, Bayona
and Sánchez spin an atmosphere of elegant foreboding that never
flags and never wears thin.
Not the least of the film's resurrections
is of Geraldine Chaplin, who has an hair-raising cameo as a spirit medium
hired by the desperate parents. But Bayona's best move is to entrust
his film to lead Belén Rueda, a hitherto little-known Castilian
who seems capable of acting rings around Nicole Kidman. With the kind
of doleful beauty that seems to be an exclusive quality of certain Spanish
actresses (e.g. Maribel Verdú, Victoria Abril), Rueda provides
the still center around which the director casts his spell of pregnant
silences. No haunted house is more memorable, after all, than a haunted
face.
A caveat: The Orphanage is
not the kind of good movie well-served by waiting for video. The quality
of the sound and the cinematography demand it be experienced on a big
screen, not your laptop.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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