The Orphanage (Dvd) - Both

I had heard very little about this film. I just knew it was a horror film and had been out around Lansing playing somewhere at some point in time. Being that Jennie is a horror buff I figured we would give this a shot. By the time I popped it in the DVD player I found out that Guillermo del Toro was presenting this film (I’ve never been sure what that even means) and that it was Spanish language film. So my hopes had reason from interested to anticipatory.

I was greatly disappointed. The film is about a family who moves into a now defunct orphanage. Laura, the mother, was previously a resident of this orphanage and the first scene depicts her as a child playing with her orphan chums. After she is adopted the movie jumps thirty years to when she arrives at the house with her husband and child. She has adopted a son who has a group of invisible friends and a secret. He unknowingly has aids, a secret his mother keeps from him. I only point this out because the movie initially makes a big deal about this in the first twenty minutes or so, but then drops it all together after the boy finds out about it. The purpose of the young child having this disease was lost on me.

I’m sure you can figure out what happens simply by hearing this set up, but I’ll give you the nickle tour anyways. One of the boy’s invisible friends actually ends up being the ghost of one of the Laura’s orphan friends. This ghost friend supposedly kidnaps the boy and the mother is then forced to search for her lost son. After six months the father gives up looking while the mother swears ghosts have her child. In her search she finds out that right after she left the orphanage after being adopted the orphans accidentally killed one of their own. In an act of vengeance a worker at the orphanage kills all of the remaining orphans (the original murdered orphan was her child – I ask, then why was he at an orphanage? Who knows.). And, in my opinion, Laura surely would have heard of this massacre when she purchased the old orphanage but she seems unaware of it. Laura solves the decades old murder case and is then given the key to finding her lost son by the now happy ghosts.

I can’t tell you how much I hate this style of horror film. Do dead children always come back to have other people help solve their murder cases? There are so many movies out their like this, The Others (2001), Stir of Echoes (1999), the Ring (2002), must I go on? I figured since this was a foreign film this might be different. Maybe outside of America there is some originality.

3 out of 10 – Nothing here is original, it isn’t even that frightening. Though if your child is murdered fear not, he or she will eventually help solve their own murder case.