Starring Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo. Written by Sergio G Sánchez. Directed by JA Bayona. (14A) 105 min.
Elegantly rendered and effectively spooky, The Orphanage courts the same viewers that may or may not have much love for genre movies but still happily lost themselves in Pan’s Labyrinth — in other words, folks too classy to admit to seeing a Wishmaster movie. In fact, Guillermo Del Toro had more than a spectral presence in this first feature by Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona. Del Toro and Bayona met 14 years ago at the Sitges fantasy film fest. The director of Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos kept tabs on his friend’s budding movie career, eventually agreeing to not only co-produce The Orphanage but endorse it with the “Guillermo Del Toro Presents…” that appears in the marketing.
In an interview with Bayona and The Orphanage’s star Belén Rueda at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the director says that the films have another important connection. “We were both focused on the idea of how people make fiction to understand their reality,” says Bayona. “I didn’t know we shared this because Guillermo was editing Pan’s Labyrinth while we were working on ours.”
And though both movies combine elements of horror, fantasy and psychological drama, The Orphanage is a less radical departure from genre tropes, drawing from a tradition of ghost stories that stems from Henry James’ 1898 chiller The Turn of the Screw. Rueda stars as Laura, a woman who returns with her husband and young son to open a school in the orphanage where she was raised. Various strange occurrences and one tragic event lead Laura to investigate the mysteries of the place and of her past.
While The Orphanage is reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw and such cinematic kin as The Innocents and The Others, Bayona says that fully conveying Laura’s story was more important than worrying about reference points. “Everything was so strong about this character and her journey,” he says, adding that “what started like a scary movie ended like a melodrama.”
He’s pleased that the movie simultaneously works on two levels: “as a ghost story and as a portrait of a woman who’s losing her mind.” The story displays a rare degree of psychological depth as it explores the possibility that Laura’s perceptions may not line up with reality. This ambiguity was also compelling to Rueda, whose performance gives The Orphanage its strong emotional core.
“In horror movies, you can do anything you want,” says the actor, who also starred in Alejandro Amenàbar’s The Sea Inside and Tom Kalin’s forthcoming Savage Grace. “But I think the good movies in the genre are the ones in which everything can be real or not real at the same time — it’s not too fantastic. There are two realities in this film: the real reality and Laura’s reality. And everything that happens has a meaning in both.”
To maintain that close harmony, Bayona largely eschewed digital effects in The Orphanage, relying on other tactics to give the film its atmosphere of unease. Particularly striking is a sequence in which the house is explored by a group of paranormal investigators and a medium played by screen legend Geraldine Chaplin. “Some of the crew didn’t understand that sequence,” says Bayona. “They were afraid of its tone and mood. For me, this sequence is like the centre of the story. It’s the sequence that gives hope to Laura and at the same time takes it out. And it was very challenging to do that scene without using digital effects. Because we wanted to stay close to reality, we couldn’t use the usual tools you find nowadays in this kind of movie.”
That’s greatly to the film’s advantage. Free of CGI gimmickry, it often makes cunning use of its environment. “We were focused on the idea of simplicity,” says Bayona. “If you just fix a camera on an object and leave it there for too much time, that object starts to be something disturbing. We used that same idea with the sound — silence is the most important tool in the movie.”
If the best ghost stories are the ones that compel you to sleep with the lights on, then The Orphanage makes the grade. Rueda says that the movie creeped out its makers, too. “In the house where we shot in the north of Spain, the sound technicians went in to record the noises in the night,” she says. “Even though the house was very old and creaky, they could hear more noises. When you are shooting a film like this, everyone around you has that feeling — your fear is bigger than usual because you are thinking about it all the time.”