The Orphanage (2007)

After the surprise success of Pan's Labyrinth last year, Picturehouse took a chance by floating this creepy Spanish ghost story to mainstream U.S. audiences. It's worth a look. The first section is paced so slowly that it's almost sleep-inducing, with a cute kid mugging for the camera in every other scene. After the young boy abruptly disappears--kidnapped, perhaps, by the invisible friends he has found in the former orphanage owned by his adoptive parents?--the film slowly comes to life. Director Juan Antonio Bayona takes a mostly restrained approach, opting to create atmosphere instead of manufacturing thrills. He does stage a single scene of grisly violence at about the halfway mark that's startling enough to keep audiences on edge for the duration, as mother Laura (Belén Rueda in a tense, wiry performance), becomes more and more consumed with the search for her vanished son. Haunted-house tropes and other genre clichés abound, but The Orphanage is actually refreshing, in part because it avoids the kind of self-conscious twist endings popularized by recent horror movies. In some ways it's a very old-fashioned piece of entertainment--it's not particularly gory, but it's spooky, scary and satisfying. A version of this review was originally published in the White Plains Times.