The Orphanage, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona
As ghostly thrillers go, this is good. Laura is adopted as a little girl; in later life, she happens to move with her her husband and her own adopted boy, Simon, to live in the old orphanage where she once lived. But the old orphanage has a strange effect on Simon (it's funny, isn't it, how buildings have this effect in ghost stories - like the hotel in The Shining. Always a mistake to move into a big old house). He begins to interact with imaginary friends, before unaccountably going missing. The rest of the story is Laura's quest to find him, and to discover what happened at the orphanage all those years ago.
Well, in a sense you've seen it before, because the general concept replicates elements of The Sixth Sense (my mother spotted the twist in that tale well before I did, infuriatingly) and The Others, arguably adding a murder mystery element, plus a children's game that reminded me of a Doctor Who episode, Blink, a fair few references to Peter Pan, Wendy, Neverland and all that, and a bit of sentimentality for good measure. So absolute originality is not what you get here. But it is very well done, and not only in terms of keeping up anxiety levels, which is too often the only thing people care about in films like this. The screenplay and acting are good, character and emotion dominate over shock but there are scares and genuine surprises, especially at one point where what happens to a character is so sudden, so unexpected, and happens so quickly that you really can't be exploited by anticipation of it, but instead feel blissfully released from tension. A good trick, worth watching the film for. The clichés are generally avoided (though I was concerned at one point that we'd see the husband and wife rowing once too often about whether to give up) and overall, this is a highly satisfactory trip to the pics.
I've not got much more to say about it: it's a good, highly competent traditional ghost story, very well worth seeing. But I agree with A. O. Scott in the New York Times more than I do with Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, or with Mark Kermode. I think the fact that this an accomplished, fairly conventional ghost story which avoids lowest-common-denominator shock tactics - a very good thing, of course - may be leading some critics to over-praise it.
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