If you want easy answers and a linear plot, The Orphanage might not be for you. But if you enjoyed the ambiguity and enveloping style of The Haunting, The Innocents, and, most recently, The Others, this film will satisfy your yearning for an intelligent ghost story. It also has a lot of heart. At its end, I shed a tear or two.

But its ending is not a conclusion. The film can be interpreted in at least two different ways: literally, or as the dream-fantasy of one of its leading characters. Like every great ghost story, its apparently reasonable ending remains open to speculation, and The Orphanage is one of the best of the genre, in the same league as the aforementioned classics.

The film begins 30 years in the past, when Laura (Bélen Rueda) was a child at a spooky orphanage. Several of the orphans had begun to play a game in which they searched for treasure -- not tons of gold, but the little items that children place in boxes or hide in special places, and which to them are as valuable as a king’s ransom. In the present, the adult Laura and her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), have bought the now-abandoned orphanage and grounds in hopes of making it into a hospice for children, and are living there with their adopted son, Simon (Roger Príncep).

But during the new hospice’s opening party, Simon disappears. Laura searches everywhere for him, even in an abandoned seacoast cave, but to no avail. Despite the lack of any evidence, she feels her son is still alive and continues to search for him, now guided by memories and feelings from 30 years before, when she lived at the orphanage. These moody thoughts often intertwine with the present to add to the mystery.

Much of the time, The Orphanage is downright scary. The old building’s creaks and groans, conveyed in startling 360-degree surround sound, are alone enough to make even an intrepid moviegoer apprehensive. The film’s look contributes to the sense of foreboding with extremely muted colors and an overall color scheme of somber blue-gray. Odd camera angels further unsettle the mood. All of these audio and visual effects raise the audience’s sense of potential danger, then release it in a jolting, violent event that occurs just before the film’s midpoint. This is the only scene that depicts any real gore; the rest of the time, we’re scared by the mere suggestion that we might have to see it again.

The acting is first-rate. Rueda, a popular Spanish television star, balances reality with weird edges in an uncanny, convincing way. Príncep plays Simon as a wide-eyed child whose lonely life is anchored by his fantasies. Geraldine Chaplin makes an appearance, effective but unnecessary to the plot, as Aurora, a medium hired to try to communicate with the missing Simon and thus discover his whereabouts.

The pacing is ideal about 80% of the time. While there was one too many endings for me, overall the script builds steady suspense. Near the end of the film, I suddenly realized that I was strongly identifying with the characters. Director Juan Antonio Bayona has found 101 subtle ways to hook his audience, much as Guillermo del Toro did in Pan’s Labyrinth. In fact, del Toro was the executive producer of The Orphanage, which many have likened to his own award-winning film. But The Orphanage owes far more to the three films mentioned in the first paragraph of this review, while standing on its own as one of the best ghost stories so far filmed in the 21st century.

• Go Back