[Once again we welcome special guest reviewer Grady Hendrix from Kaiju Shakedown with a review of The Orphanage.]
It’s not hard to predict exactly how much money Spanish horror movie, THE ORPHANAGE, is going to make when it’s released in the US this December: $37,634,615. It’s exactly what PAN’S LABYRINTH grossed and THE ORPHANAGE shares more than a few similarities with that movie. It’s presented by LABYRINTH director Guillermo del Toro, it’s distributed by the same US studios (New Line and Picturehouse), it’s almost the exact same running time, it shares more than a few story similarities (similar beginning and ending and both movies are, thematically, very very
close) and it sports the same level of technical polish. It’s a horror movie for the Merchant Ivory set: tasteful, restrained and technically excellent.
This will, of course, drive horror movie buffs crazy. If you love your horror to come complete with transgressions galore then you’ll hate THE ORPHANAGE, which is serving up the same dishes everyone else has been turning out for the last 10 years, only with a far higher degree of skill and precision. There’s not a scare in the movie that isn’t of the “Don’t pull back the blanket you’ll see something gross!” variety or that’s a shock jump complete with a blast of music. There is very little gore and nastiness but, as in LABYRINTH, just enough to add spice without turning off an arthouse audience. It’s a horror movie with its hair combed and its teeth brushed, wearing its Sunday best and asking to date your daughter, and who could refuse? It’s got such good manners. It’s something of a machine, but it’s a pretty awe-inspiring one. I saw it at a press screening and not only was the room packed but within the first half hour everyone was screaming, shrieking, laughing and talking back to the screen. It was a little bit like being in hell, but I’d be a total Grinch not to point out that this is not the kind of behavior the normally “too cool for school” press indulges in.
The story is enough to turn off most potential horror fans – it feels like something we’ve all seen a dozen times before. TV actor, Belen Rueda, plays Laura, a woman coming back to the orphanage where she grew up to start a home for handicapped kids with her husband, Carlos, and son, Simon, in tow. Predictably, the second they show up, strange noises start busting out all over, a weird social worker appears, and Simon starts seeing dead people. But at the half hour mark it all goes out the window and becomes something richer and rawer and from that point on if your eyes aren’t pinned to the screen then you may just have to accept the fact that you don’t like good movies.
The screenplay sports a major plot hole, but the movie sails past that rough spot relatively smoothly, and there’s also a sudden character change in Carlos to make him the clichéd horror movie husband at the eleventh hour which is all the more jarring because the film seemed so cliché-free up until that point. But besides these two quibbles this is a film that should be studied in film schools as a way to take something old and make it new again. It’s as if the filmmakers had never even heard of the concept of laziness. On paper this movie sounds like a dozen others, but its breathes and comes alive onscreen like no other.
Running throughout the film, for better or for worse, is the theme of age and experience coming into conflict with children who refuse to grow up, and there couldn’t be a more apt metaphor for where this movie stands in relation to American film: whereas Hollywood horror is all about teenagers, THE ORPHANAGE is about grown-ups. Mushiness that would pass muster in an American-made horror flick (“She’s going into the basement because, you know, she just is. Otherwise we can’t get her killed cool with the weed whacker.”) is nowhere to be found, and the characters aren’t nubile teens with negligible talent (Sarah Michelle Gellar, I’m talking to you) but middle-aged men and women who can tear up the screen when necessary. Even the supporting actors like Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie’s granddaughter) make a meal out of their one scene and their set pieces feel not only necessary but downright inevitable.
So you leave THE ORPHANAGE feeling a little bit inferior. American pop culture used to rule the world: we thought that we were the big daddy and that they were the kids trying to imitate what we were doing. But seeing what the world has given back to us in the past few years (a better ghost movie with THE ORPHANAGE, a better monster movie with PAN’S LABYRINTH, a better sci fi movie with CHILDREN OF MEN) it’s hard not to feel like we’re suddenly the children who want a sequel to THE TRANSFORMERS and they’re the adults who are actually making movies that will be remembered. THE ORPHANAGE is a movie made by and for grown-ups and it’s so good, so rich, and so accomplished that it makes growing up look cool. And that’s downright un-American.
Reivew by Grady Hendrix.