Are you looking for horror movies worth watching? Don’t miss The Orphanage movie review!
Although set in a familiar setting in the horror movie series as an orphanage, The Orphanage since its debut in 2007 has always been appreciated by viewers in the top Spanish horror titles thanks to its many stories. layers, there is no shortage of dramatic knots and extremely tightly structured chilling scares. Let’s follow the sharing for The Orphanage movie review below.
Overview of The Orphanage movie
- IMDb rating: 7.4/10
- Genre: Drama, horror, mystery
- Director: J.A. Bayona
- Casting: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep
Film of the same genre: Crimson Peak Movie Review
Summary of movie
Before entering The Orphanage movie review, let’s take a look at the movie.
It all starts with a kid’s game. “One, two, three, knock on the door,” a young girl’s voice drifts over the bright frame…the children run, laughing, chasing each other across a lawn in a game of tag, while an elderly woman watches from the porch of a lovely manor. We hear via a phone conversation that Laura, the young girl with the singsong voice, would be going soon–the lovely place with the cheerful children is an orphanage.
Laura, her husband, Carlos, and their adoptive son, Simón, return to the orphanage years later. Laura and Carlos aim to rebuild the ancient structure and reopen the orphanage, which will accept children with impairments or diseases. Laura takes Simón on a walk shortly after they arrive at their new house to show him her old haunts–they go to the beach, and Laura tells her son about the cave where she and her friends used to play.
Simón rushes in, giddy with excitement and anxious to investigate, while Laura remains outside gathering shells. Laura screams out for her kid when it’s time to depart, but he doesn’t respond. She enters the cave to discover Simón conversing with his new friend Tomás. Simón sketches a drawing of his new buddies (he has six of them) later that evening and says that Tomás always wears a mask. Laura dismisses Tomás and the others as the result of her son’s vivid imagination but continues to play along with him.
Strange things begin to happen after that. Benigna, a strange social worker, is rumored to be lurking around the property. There’s also the weird scavenger hunt game, which leads Simón to a terrifying revelation. When the home is eventually renovated and Laura and her family throw a party for the newcomers, she notices a tiny kid wearing a mask that looks very similar to Simón’s.
Simón vanished after that.
Laura is horrified, and she devotes herself to locating her lost kid in every way she can. She refuses to accept he’s gone and embarks on her own eerie adventure.
The Orphanage movie review
The film tells two storylines that combine into one. You know what happened to Laura when she left the orphanage, and you know what happened to Simón. The orphanage’s tragedy is the murder of crippled children and the concealment of their deaths. Their ghosts still linger in the house, and Simón has the ability to see things that his parents cannot. Of course, this is dismissed as fantasy, but when Simón vanishes, Laura misinterprets what she sees as Simón’s imagined companions becoming real…which they were.
Simón, on the other hand, was not swept away by spirits. He was locked in a basement chamber when the door was accidentally shut, and he died after falling through a rickety banister… which Laura even heard.
The cast of The Orphanage is great. As Laura, Belén Rueda has a stronghold on the screen. She’s determined to reclaim her kid and will go to any length to do it. She considers possibilities she’d never considered before, and in the end, she chooses death and the duty of an eternal protector above life. Fernando Cayo is the cynic who tries to persuade his wife that Simón is most certainly dead, but he recognizes that this isn’t an acceptable response for her. Geraldine Chaplin, an American actress, plays one of the psychics in the film and speaks Spanish.
The beauty of The Orphanage film is that the film incorporates the fear of ghosts into the classic fear: of losing a child. So much so that after watching it for many years, when I think about it, the fear persists in my head. Can’t help but feel heartbroken when watching Laura’s mother burst into the barn, and go down to the dark cellar to find baby Simon in despair.
Ghost movies are mostly scary scenes “forced by the director”, like hearing strange noises without worrying about hiding, but “getting into the dark to explore” what to do when 5 minutes ago was just scary. But as a mother, Laura must use all her courage to find her child, even if she has to face ghosts.
Viewers clearly understand why she keeps risking her life, her every action has a reason, not because the director forced her. And it’s this rationality that scares us more – no one cares if we act like idiots. Viewers are spoiled for choice between wanting Laura to find baby Simon and stopping Laura, because the more she tries to find him, the more likely she is to encounter the ghosts that are lurking in the old orphanage.
In conclusion, the full The Orphanage movie, in general, looks great because of its gothic and classic feelings. The primary spirit has a small but horrifying confrontation with Laura that is a great jump scare. You may be able to go into any basement on the planet, but do you still… feel something as you walk down into the gloomy basement of the house where you grew up?
End The Orphanage movie review, do you think this is a great movie to watch? If you want to see the top list of Spanish horror movies, go to Spanishlanguage.com.
