Cinema
The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (15) ***
MEXICAN filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) strongly influences the look and mood of Juan Antonio Bayona's directorial debut in his role as producer of The Orphanage.
Indeed, Sergio G Sanchez's script has strong echoes of Del Toro's ghost story The Devil's Backbone (El Espinazo Del Diablo), a chilling yarn set in a haunted orphanage during the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War.
In Bayona's film, a doting mother, Laura (Belen Rueda), who was raised in an orphanage, returns to the grand house of her youth with the intention of renovating the crumbling property as a home for disabled and disadvantaged children.
Her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and seven-year-old son Simon (Roger Princep) support her in this altruistic endeavour.
Laura grows increasingly concerned about Simon, who seems to be more interested in his imaginary friend than the real world. Eventually the boy turns on Laura. "You're not my mother and I'm going to die,'' he tells her angrily.
Soon after, Simon vanishes without a trace, plunging Laura and Carlos into the midst of every parent's worst nightmare.
Scares are disappointingly thin on the ground in The Orphanage. Bayona conjures an atmosphere of foreboding but there is little in his haunted house we haven't seen before apart from one sequence - Laura's game of statues with some ghost children - that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
Rueda essays a vulnerable and likeable heroine, challenging forces beyond her comprehension, with a brief supporting turn from Geraldine Chaplin as a medium who posits: "Seeing is not believing, it's the other way round.''
See it at the Lighthouse.
12:39pm Friday 11th April 2008
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