In 'Orphanage,' a masterful mix of dread and suspense

January 11, 2008|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

To all the young Hollywood directors remaking and ruining Japanese horror movies: You're looking in the wrong direction. West, not east, is where the craft of modern suspense is being perfected. Spain is where filmmakers are telling ghost stories to keep our minds whirring into the night, too happily petrified to fall asleep.

What keeps J.A. Bayona's "The Orphanage" in the front drawer of one's nightmares - what makes it harder to shake than a month of lousy teenage haunted-cellphone movies - is its burnished classical style. That and the distressed magnificence of actress Belén Rueda in the lead role of Laura, a nurse who returns to the abandoned orphanage where she grew up. From the opening moments in which wallpaper is ripped away to reveal the credits lurking below, the movie administers dread in fiendishly measured doses.

With her doctor husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), Laura plans to make the building over to house special-needs kids, one of whom is the couple's adopted son, Simón (Roger Príncep), 6 years old and born HIV-infected. How can you bring in new kids, though, when the ghosts of the old ones refuse to leave?

Simón has two imaginary friends, and anyone who saw "The Shining" will already feel their neck hairs stirring. He meets another during the course of a sojourn in a nearby cave, leaving a trail of seashells to lead the invisible lost boy back home. In the morning the shells are piled up outside the orphanage door. This is the least of the movie's unsettling developments.

On one level, "The Orphanage" uses the ritual trappings of horror-suspense as we've come to expect them: creepy masked figures at the end of hallways, childish titterings in the walls (how "Blair Witch"), stately tracking shots resolving with an unexpected "gotcha" (or not). In the wrong hands - lazy ones - these are clichés. When used by filmmakers who understand craft and performance and story and atmosphere, they pull us reluctantly down the basement steps toward our own fears.

So while there's a creepy old lady named Benigna who haunts the film's fringes, actress Montserrat Carulla evokes as much pity as horror behind her coke-bottle lenses. She doesn't know it but she's a ghost, too, and so is Laura, not in any "Sixth Sense" sense but in the way a person can be pinned to events and sins they think are long buried.