That horror movie, thankfully, has arrived. It’s called “The Orphanage,” and it is seriously scary. This little Spanish ghost movie—made by a gifted young filmmaker named Juan Antonio Bayona and produced by Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro, the man behind last year’s Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth”—remixes many familiar horror-movie tropes: a haunted house that was once an orphanage, a sickly child with imaginary friends, a spiritualist contacting the dead, a grieving mother (played to the hilt by Bel?n Rueda of “The Sea Inside”) whose sanity appears suspect to everyone but herself. Though it bears a strong relation to such films as “The Others” (directed by another Spaniard, Alejandro Amen?bar) and “The Innocents,” the elegantly chilling 1961 version of “The Turn of the Screw,” it feels freshly imagined. The shivers of dread “The Orphanage” conjures up rely neither on gore nor on special effects: the sight of a child standing in a hallway wearing a grotesquely disturbing burlap mask freaked me out more profoundly than any severed limbs in “Saw.”
The less you know of the plot, the better. Let’s just say that Sergio S?nchez’s richly ambiguous screenplay allows you to interpret what you are watching on both a supernatural and a psychological level, and either way is equally unnerving. The small screening-room crowd I watched the movie with was a pretty sophisticated bunch—but not for long. Forty minutes in, our defenses had been shredded. We were alone with our fears, but we quivered as one.
