Movie Review: The Orphanage

While it's trendy these days to look to the Far East for exotic horror thrills, there has been a tradition of Spanish language horror that dates back decades and has largely gone unnoticed over here. Luckily, we've got Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro to raise the profile for his native tongue, and The Orphanage is the latest film to have his name attached to it.

This movie is actually just 'presented' by him, but it's very much in-keeping with his brand of chiller, which blends visceral shocks with moving character-based drama. It's the story of a couple who decide to reopen an old orphanage, but find their lives torn apart when their adopted son goes missing...

The most famous orphan in cinema is probably little Annie, and let's face it, you've got to work hard to make a parentless child more terrifying than the carrot-haired freak-child of John Huston's 1982 musical. The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona clearly realises this, so has his spooky ghost kid – a creepy little squirt called Tomas – wear a nasty cloth bag on his head while scaring the crap out of our grieving parents.

In general though, this is a film that relies on a build-up of tension and uncomfortable psychological anguish rather than traditional shocks, despite containing one of the single best jump-out-your-seat frights since Carrie decided that being buried wasn't much fun after all.

Much of the success of The Orphanage comes from the moving lead performance of Belen Rueda, as the woman who refuses to give up hope that her child has gone.

Although the film is most reminiscent of The Others and del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, there are also shades of Poltergeist, as Rueda brings in a team of paranormal experts to investigate the strange sounds she hears in the house. But luckily, we're spared the high-pitched squawking of Poltergeist ghost-hunter Zelda Rubinstein, who in 1982 gave Annie a run for her money when it came to diminutive annoyances.

The Orphanage may not quite hit the heights of del Toro's best work, but it's still one of the strongest horror movies of the last 12 months. It's beautifully shot, with a deeply moving climax that achieves that rare trick of being both tragic and uplifting. And let's face it, you don’t get that with the Resident Evil movies.