Orphanage, The

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"Believe and you will see."

Given the popularity of the ghost-story genre, it's surprising that the cinema has given us so few really good ones. In the past couple of decades it seems as though movies have abandoned things like tension and suspense in favor of blood and gore. But there was a time, and, fortunately, there still is a time, for old-fashioned frights. Among the ghost stories I have found most entertaining through the years are "The Uninvited" (1944), "The Haunting" (1963), "The Legend of Hell House" (1973), "Poltergeist" (1982), "The Others" (2001), and "The Ring" (2002). I suppose you could also throw in a couple of nontraditional ghost stories like "Alien" (1979), which may seem outwardly like science fiction but at its core is really a good haunted-house story, and "The Sixth Sense" (1999).

I mention these movies to point out that good chillers are hard to come by. What we usually get are "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" clones, things like the recent "One Missed Call," "Rest Stop," or "Feast of Flesh." That's why I find a film like 2007's "The Orphanage" ("El Orfanato") so welcome. It's a Spanish production, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, whose work has mainly been in Spanish television and music videos, but it was produced by Guillermo del Toro of "Pan's Labyrinth," "Hellboy," and "The Devil's Backbone" fame. You can see del Toro's hand in many scenes in "The Orphanage," and if you like del Toro's touch, you'll like Bayona's work and "The Orphanage," too. It's a wonderfully low-key shocker.

Like all good ghost stories, this one's got a creepy old house at its center. Overlooking a rocky coast of Spain, it's a former orphanage, a huge, rambling place where the main character, Laura (Belen Rueda), spent a part of her childhood. Now thirty-seven years old, Laura persuades her doctor husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), to buy the long-abandoned building of her youth and turn it into a home for special children. Their own son, the adopted boy Simon (Roger Princep), is a child of special needs: He's got HIV and must take medications each day to survive.

All goes well for the first few days the family is there, and then things turn peculiar. Simon insists he sees and plays with invisible "friends," presumably imaginary. An old lady, Benigna Escobedo (Montserrat Carulla), shows up claiming to be a social worker, but no one has heard of her, and later Laura finds her prowling around the house in the dead of night. Shortly thereafter, Laura finds that someone, or some thing, seems to be trying to communicate with her and Simon, as Simon leads them on a treasure hunt around the grounds of the old house. A mysterious little boy with a gunnysack mask over his head shows up, and he seems none too friendly. Laura finds a curious doorknob lying about in the house, but she cannot fathom what it's for, as there is no door without a knob.

Then one of Simon's invisible friends, Tomas, tells him that his parents adopted him, a fact he relates to Laura and Carlos. And shortly thereafter Simon goes missing, almost driving Laura mad with grief. Thus, the movie is more than a spine tingler; it's an adept psychological study of a mother's loss.

So, that's the story's setup. Next, the movie explores Laura's growing obsession with the supernatural, her building suspicion that the house contains spirits of the children who used to attend the orphanage with her, and her determination that Simon is alive and in the company of the spirits. She even calls upon a medium, Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin), to conduct a psychic investigation of the house, something Laura's husband as well as a police psychologist, Pilar (Mabel Rivera), thoroughly disapprove of.

Meanwhile, the tension grows by the minute. This is a quiet film for the most part and a highly imaginative one, well filmed, with plenty of odd angles, winding corridors, and dark corners and a musical score that elicits shudders from the outset. Still, it's those hushed moments that are most telling because it's from these seemingly serene intervals that the movie's most frightful elements arise.

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