In a towering and creaking old beast of a building somewhere in a gorgeous coastal part of Spain, an attractive couple on the younger slope of middle age pass the days in enjoyable semi-solitude with their adorable seven-year-old son. The building is actually an old orphanage, where the mother, Laura (Belén Rueda), spent her formative years and which she and her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), now intend to open again as a home for children with special needs. It makes sense: their boy Simón (Roger Príncep) is lonely and seems to be getting a little too involved with his two invisible friends, Watson and Pepe. One day, Laura and Simón go for a walk down by the sea cliffs and she loses him briefly in a cave. When she finds him, he appears to have made a few more imaginary friends. And things aren’t quite the same after that in the orphanage.

In his stealthily creepy The Orphanage, first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona makes a decent bid for consideration as one of the new wave of Spanish directors, and looks likely to be soon making the hop to Hollywood in the footsteps of the film’s producer, Guillermo del Toro. Bayona has managed a very difficult task here, making a large batch of genre tropes – from lost children to haunted houses to buried crimes and even lonely lighthouses in the foggy night – jump out of the precisely ordered mise-en-scene as if they were freshly minted. His film shares so many stylistic and thematic characteristics of del Toro’s movies (particularly The Devil’s Backbone) that he has the added pressure of not being seen to ape his producer’s work. Despite all this, and on almost every level that it needs to, The Orphanage succeeds.
Much is due to the top-notch cast Bayona has assembled, starting with Belén Rueda as the mother, whose sense of guilt and loss, once she gets an inkling of the dark world she has led her fragile family into, is achingly real. Although allowing Simón to be played by an actor of such endearing cuteness as Roger Príncep would seem to indicate a perverse or sentimental streak in the filmmaker, such worries are quickly put to rest by the boy’s consummate skill. Most of the other adults are competent but beside the point – with the grand exception of a sly and sharp Geraldine Chaplin playing a medium whose skills are called upon later in the film – as the film centres for the most part on Rueda. To give away anything else about the story would be unfair; suffice it to say that Rueda’s little nuclear family is hardly alone in their once and future orphanage.

Bayona and his screenwriter (the frighteningly talented Sergio G Sánchez) display a wealth of influences here, mostly from the classic ghost story side of the horror film vault – not to mention the glossy, crackling darkness of del Toro’s work – and they are deployed to maximum effect. Although not trading heavily in gore or shock value, the film yields a good half-dozen moments of precisely calibrated fright that will reduce a number of people in any audience to quivering jelly. The filmmakers make such moments all the more effective by not being so much interested in sheer fright as in evoking a ghostly and otherworldly feel that seeps into almost every frame. This is a ghost story, for sure, but the kind that is more truly about the terror and acceptance of death than anything else. To paraphrase an old saying, as long as people are afraid of dying, they will be afraid of ghosts; do the makers of The Orphanage ever know that to be true!

Chris Barsanti