{"id":3745,"date":"2007-12-13T12:39:41","date_gmt":"2007-12-13T17:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinemacrazed.wordpress.com\/?p=3745"},"modified":"2007-12-13T12:39:41","modified_gmt":"2007-12-13T17:39:41","slug":"the-orphanage-el-orfanato-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/13\/the-orphanage-el-orfanato-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Too often we\u2019ve found films that some great director is presenting and too often we\u2019ve been let down, disillusioned and left to wonder why said director would approve of such a horrible title. This is thankfully not the case with \u201cThe Orphanage.\u201d Executive Producer Guillermo Del Toro, currently the best director in modern film, presents a film that\u2019s very much in the gamut of the man\u2019s past titles. \u201cThe Orphanage\u201d has the touch of Del Toro all over it, and like the previous films, Bayona\u2019s supernatural drama is a wonderful tale about innocence lost, and children ravaged by cruelty.<\/p>\n

Though reminiscent of films like \u201cSilent Hill,\u201d and \u201cThe Sixth Sense,\u201d Bayona stages a deliberately paced supernatural drama about a woman named Laura who moves back into the orphanage she spent her early childhood in. The orphanage is not as dark and dank as many would expect. It\u2019s a warm and cozy cottage where Laura lives with her husband and their adopted son Simon. Simon is a child with HIV, and is constantly too afraid to sleep. Laura is now welcoming more children into the house to care for, but Simon is affected as the days near, and his \u201cgames\u201d with his imaginary friends soon turn dire as Simon suddenly disappears one day. \u201cThe Orphanage\u201d is set amidst the common Del Toro theme of adults with unresolved childhood demons and the children that somehow manage to unlock these past wounds and communicate on a different level. Only when Laura submits to the temperament of a child does she begin to learn of clues that will lead her to a grim and often times horrifying answer that Bayona steadily leads us to. \u201cThe Orphanage\u201d is a masterful mystery with elements and plot devices that don\u2019t always make sense upon first glance.<\/p>\n

I was sure I had no idea what was occurring before me or what Bayona\u2019s hook was, but sweeping direction and a simplistic narrative make it a slow boil surprise with some truly scary and heartbreaking moments. Bayona heightens the tension as the mystery progresses and the deeper Laura gets the scarier the proceedings become, and every option is explored in terms of solving the events. One of the most gripping moments involves Laura and her skeptical husband Carlos inviting a medium to the house to see what they can\u2019t, and it leads to one of the more memorably moments in film in the last five years. But Bayona, while inviting us to solve the mystery also never fails to introduce some great red herrings causing us to sympathize with but always second guess our heroine. Is Laura losing her mind? Does the orphanage hold something that refuses to die? How far would you go to save your child? Bel\u00e9n Rueda gives one of the best performances of the year as the grieving mother Laura who refuses to admit that her son Simon may just be dead and gone.<\/p>\n

Rueda is very much in the tradition of Del Toro tragic heroines who are left to uncover something sinister that many with a naked eye can not. Rueda is given all the best moments as she slowly unravels bits and pieces of the hook writer Sanchez maps out and keeps Rueda at her emotional peak from minute one. \u201cThe Orphanage\u201d is not a horror film even though it does sport some genuinely scary moments; but underneath its exterior it\u2019s a sad and gripping story about tragedy and children who still cry out after a sad and unfortunate life. Like Del Toro, Bayona touches on these themes perfectly and creates a bonafide masterpiece. It\u2019s rare that a brilliant director can approve of a film that\u2019s actually worth watching, and this is a surprising exception. \u201cThe Orphanage\u201d is a sad, scary, and suspenseful supernatural drama with an excellent performance, and wonderful direction from Juan Antonio Boyana, and will definitely be a great companion piece to the likes of \u201cThe Devil\u2019s Backbone\u201d and \u201cPan\u2019s Labyrinth.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Too often we\u2019ve found films that some great director is presenting and too often we\u2019ve been let down, disillusioned and left to wonder why said director would approve of such a horrible title. This is thankfully not the case with \u201cThe Orphanage.\u201d Executive Producer Guillermo Del Toro, currently the best director in modern film, presents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[302,367,744,1008,1013,1087],"class_list":["post-3745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-drama","tag-foreign","tag-o","tag-supernatural","tag-suspense","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}