Sadness and the supernatural

>> The creators of the Spanish horror film
The Orphanage on their affecting and
terrifying story of loss

by MARK SLUTSKY

In the past few years, something interesting has been happening in the horror cinema of the Spanish-speaking world. While American horror movies have become increasingly preoccupied with an almost nerdy obsession with torture and the degradation of the human body, directors like Guillermo del Toro have taken the genre in a more emotional, intimate direction.

Del Toro’s films The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth had their share of scares, for sure, but their thoughtful treatment of themes of loss and loneliness expand the definition of the horror genre. This isn’t to say anything against movies that are “just” scary—or that horror movies haven’t mined emotional territory before—but del Toro’s films leave a particularly affecting impression, made as they are with a certain expansive gentleness.

It’s not surprising then, that del Toro should be credited as producer (the film is also “presented” by him) of The Orphanage (El Orfanato), the debut feature from Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. Like del Toro’s Spanish-language horror movies, The Orphanage mixes sadness and the supernatural in a very moving way.

In an amazingly vulnerable performance, Belén Rueda plays Laura, a woman who returns to run the orphanage she lived in as a child, to re-open it as a home for children with serious illnesses. As it turns out, her son Simón (Roger Princep) is quite sick himself, with an unnamed malady requiring lots of attention and daily medication.

The kid also happens to have a creepy imaginary friend, who has the tendency to incarnate wearing a horrifying sack mask and terrorize Rueda. Making matters worse, a just-as-creepy nanny, Benigna (Montserrat Carulla), shows up to disrupt the orphanage even more, leading to a series of events where the sick son disappears.

As time goes by, Rueda gets increasingly, and understandably, frantic about the state of the boy, eventually turning to the supernatural for an explanation. (In one amazing sequence, a psychic, played by Geraldine Chaplin, does an investigative tour of the orphanage that the other characters monitor on night-vision video; it’s truly spooky). The real story of her son’s disappearance ends up hinging on her own past in a surprising way, and without giving anything away, the story takes a twist that grimly and deliberately echoes Peter Pan.

The other side of the story

“I think Peter Pan is actually the saddest book ever written!” says Sergio G. Sánchez, the film’s screenwriter. He, Bayona and Rueda are speaking to the Mirror at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, where The Orphanage has been met with almost universal acclaim. “Of course people know the story most from Disney films, but the last chapter of that book is just devastating, and when I first read the novel, I thought ‘Jesus, this is so sad, so beautiful.’ And it’s so interesting, because the story is really told as an adventure tale for kids. But when you look at it from the other side, from the mother’s point of view, it’s about a mother who’s been waiting by her window for God knows how long for the children to come back.”

Sánchez had been working on the script for years when he finally met Bayona. “I started writing it almost 10 years ago. I did a short film that was very similar in tone, and I was trying to get this thing done, and I met Juan Antonio at a short film festival and showed him the script,” he says.

But it was del Toro’s involvement that allowed them to realize the project according to their own vision. Bayona had known him for years, and, as he says, “He helped us to shoot the movie the way it was meant to be. It all started like a very low-budget Spanish movie, and he helped us to do some of the things we really wanted to do, like having the orphanage built on the set. At the same time, he was very respectful, he never suggested ideas more than once—in fact, at some point during the making of the movie, we were worried because we weren’t paying that much attention to what he said! He was very sensitive about our situation.”

Sánchez wrote the film with a specific house in mind for the orphanage, and a specific stretch of coastline for a climactic scene on the beach. “It’s very near my hometown, in Asturias, on the northwest coast of Spain. The production team went to visit that house, but it was just falling apart, and it was too dangerous to shoot in there.”

So a set had to be built, and locations stitched together to create seamless sequences. “The thing is, I’ve got the movie in my head, so I was trying—like Hitchcock, for example—to do the movie shot-by-shot,” Bayona says. “It was like trying to get all the pieces from this puzzle together. So we went there, and there, and there and there to have it look like the geography in my mind. It was very complicated, especially for the actors!”

Sharing loneliness

The film illustrates in heartbreaking detail the sense of frustration and loss that accompanies the loss of a family member. “I have two daughters, and I can understand that you are crazy when something like that happens,” Rueda says. “When we were preparing the film, we spoke with a family that had a daughter who had been missing for nine years. And you can understand, their life changes completely, because they are always waiting. I think that it’s very hard, when someone that you love is dead—but when you don’t know where he or she is, you can’t live your life in the same way.”

It’s a sense of emotional isolation that unites the movie. “All of the characters in the movie share a feeling of loneliness,” Bayona says. “The woman, the mother, her children, the husband, even the ghosts in the story, what they need is someone. Because there are no bad characters in the movie. There is not the good and the bad. I think that you can sympathize with all of them because you understand this feeling of sadness, in the whole story and in every character.”

“Even Benigna, who’s like the wicked witch of the story,” Sanchez chimes in. “You feel sorry for her. She’s almost like what the character of Laura would have become, if she’d been allowed to go crazy beyond the point of no return. But you feel more sorry for her than scared of her.”

“Many times people have asked me if I believe in ghosts,” Rueda says. “And I can see, that when something very hard happens to you, maybe you start to believe in many things you didn’t believe before. Because you need it.”

El Orfanato opens
Friday, Dec. 28