The Orphanage (film)
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| The Orphanage | |
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 Spanish Promotional Poster |
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| Directed by | Juan Antonio Bayona |
| Produced by | Mar Targarona Joaquín Padro Álvaro Agustín Guillermo del Toro |
| Written by | Sergio G. Sánchez |
| Starring | Belén Rueda Geraldine Chaplin Fernando Cayo Mabel Rivera Roger Príncep Montserrat Carulla Edgar Vivar |
| Music by | Fernando Velázquez |
| Cinematography | Óscar Faura |
| Editing by | Elena Ruiz |
| Distributed by |  Warner Bros. Pictures Picturehouse |
| Release date(s) | 11 October 2007 28 December 2007 (limited) 11 January 2008 (open) 14 February 2008 21 March 2008 |
| Running time | 105 min. |
| Country | Spain & Mexico |
| Language | Spanish |
| Preceded by | Rodar & Rodar |
| Official website | |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Orphanage (Spanish title: El orfanato) is a 2007 Spanish horror/suspense/drama film. It stars Belén Rueda as Laura, a woman who returns to the orphanage where she stayed for a period as a child. She purchases the house, with plans to turn it into a home for disabled children. Everything seems to be going well for Laura, her husband Carlos (Cayo) and their son Simón (Príncep). However, the parents soon realize their son has an imaginary friend and horror begins to unfold.
The film is directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, produced by the Spanish production company Rodar y Rodar, co-produced by Telecinco and presented by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. The film opened at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2007. It opened Spain's Sitges Film Festival on October 4, 2007. The film opened in limited release in the United States on December 28, 2007. It went into wide release in the U.S. on January 11, 2008.
The Orphanage was chosen by the Spanish Academy of Films as Spain's nominee for the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, but ultimately did not end up as one of the five final nominees in that category.
The film was nominated for 14 Goya Awards, including Best Picture. It won seven.
In 2007, New Line Cinema bought the rights to produce an English-language remake.[1]
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[edit] Plot
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The plot summary in this article or section is too long or detailed compared to the rest of the article. Please edit the article to focus on discussing the work rather than merely reiterating the plot. |
Laura, with her physician husband Carlos, returns to an orphanage where she had lived as a child with plans of reopening it as a home for sick and disabled children. They adopted a son named Simón who is HIV-positive, though he is unaware of either his adoption or his illness. Simón has imaginary friends and his mother is concerned that he is too old for them. He is scared in his large dark new home and Laura tells him that the invisible light from the lighthouse at the beach will protect him.
Laura takes Simón to visit a cave near the beach, and he claims to meet a new imaginary friend. After returning home, he draws a picture of him. He is named Tomás, and he wears a sack mask. Because Simón has always had imaginary friends, both Laura and Carlos play along with his stories. Simón later says that he has become acquainted with six imaginary friends.
A mysterious social worker appears one day, talking obliquely of some new treatment for Simón and revealing to Laura that she has his old adoption file. Laura becomes angry at her intrusion with these hidden truths and sends her away, locking Simon's file she brought up in a desk in the kitchen. That night, after investigating some rattling noises she hears outside, Laura finds the mysterious social worker hiding in a shed. Though Laura screams for Carlos' help, the woman escapes before anything else occurs. After reporting the incident, it is discovered that there is no social worker registered with the name Benigna, which the woman gave.
One day, Simón tells Laura about a game that Tomás has created for him, a type of scavenger hunt. They find something in a place where its not supposed to be, go to its original place and find something else, and so on. Simon says that at the end they should find gold coins and that he will get a wish. The game leads them to the locked drawer where Simón's file is hidden. Simón angrily reveals to Laura that he knows that she is not his real mother and that he is going to die. When she asks him how he knows that, he responds that his friends told him.
Soon after, Laura hosts a party for the disabled children to welcome them to their new home. When asking Simón to come down and join them, he first begs to show her where Tomás' "small home" is, but after an argument, and a slap on the face in the spur of the moment, Laura leaves Simón alone upstairs. Back in the garden, she watches the children in play, all of them eerily wearing masks that Carlos is taking out of an old trunk. She and Carlos exchange looks as she nods upstairs, indicating that Simón is still in the house. As she walks away a boy with a sack mask, a lot like the picture that Simón drew after their visit to the cave, is standing behind her, unnoticed. The name "Tomás" is embroidered into his shirt. When Laura returns to check on Simón she cannot find him. She checks in the bathroom at the end of the hall only to be confronted by the boy in a sack mask. After she tries to remove the boy's mask he violently locks her in the bathroom, slamming the door on her hand and pushing her back into the tub. She screams for Carlos and he pries the door open. She then starts a frantic search throughout the house and throughout the masked children, looking and calling for Simón.
In frantically searching for Simón, Laura runs out into the sea to check the cave and breaks her leg badly. She sees a small boy standing in the cave, but she's unable to make it to the cave because of the high tide and her broken leg. The police search, but Simón cannot be found; he has simply disappeared without a trace. At the medical center Carlos brings the police psychologist Pilo in to speak with her.
Late in the night after returning from having her leg set, Laura hears banging and pounding in the walls of the home, which frightens her and begins to make her think something supernatural may be occurring.
Months later, Laura and her husband go for a drive. At a traffic light, they are surprised by Benigna crossing the street with a baby carriage in front of them. Laura calls out to her and as Benigna turns to look at them she is suddenly rammed by a speeding ambulance. Laura, in a panic, checks under the ambulance that killed Benigna, thinking Simón was in the carriage. Instead, she finds a doll that looks like Tomás with the odd sack mask on. Laura then rushes to where a crowd has gathered around the stricken woman where Carlos is attempting to resuscitate her. After a few moments he says that the woman is dead. Laura reaches for the woman's whistle necklace and in her dying breath the woman snatches Laura's hand away.
After searching the woman's home the police find old super 8mm films and photographs, discovering that Benigna worked at the orphanage long ago. The police psychologist Pilo shows Laura an old photo with her in it and her five childhood friends. In the back row we see a young Benigna who Laura never remembered. It turns out that she had a deformed son named Tomás, who she tried to keep hidden from everyone and who wore a sack mask to cover his deformed face. After Laura had been adopted and left the orphanage, her five remaining friends played a horrible trick on Tomás, taking him to the beachside cave and stealing his mask from him. They wanted to see if he would dare to come out without his mask. Ashamed, he refused and drowned in the cave once the tide rose.
The desperate Laura attends a lecture on the paranormal and then arranges to have a medium explore the orphanage for clues to her son's disappearance. The medium sees five child ghosts and hears them screaming in pain, dying of poisoning. Despite the fact that he heard the childs' voices as well, Carlos - with the support of the psychologist Pilo - kicks everyone out of the home, dismissing it all as parlour tricks. The medium reveals to Laura that the reason she can see the dead is that she had been close to death herself, showing scars on her arm and looking at Laura's as well. As the medium is leaving, Laura begs the her to tell her how she can find her son - the medium replies that she must use her grief as strength to help her find him, but it all depends on how far she wants to go. She says that "seeing is believing" is actually the other way around. Carlos thinks his wife has gone crazy and begs her to leave the orphanage but she refuses.
Later Laura, following clues she believes are being left by Tomás in a scavenger hunt game again, finds five sacks full of human bones in the very shed that she caught Benigna snooping in. The police come in and conclude that Benigna had exacted revenge on the children who she felt cruelly murdered her son. Carlos and Laura argue. Carlos again asks her to leave with him but she refuses; she insists that there are too many memories in the house and she needs two days alone to say good-bye before joining him.
After recreating her time in the house as a young girl by bringing in the old furniture and linens and by dressing up in a matron's uniform, Laura takes her sedation medication to get close to death herself. She conjures the ghosts of the dead friends from her childhood by playing their childhood game and they lead her to a hidden door in a closet. Behind the door are stairs leading to a dark basement where she finds Tomás' drawings all over the walls, his drawings of the other children. She then finds Simón alive and hugs him to her in a blanket, frantically urging him to pretend that this is all a fantasy, that his friends aren't real. However, when the ghosts go away, she realises the blanket is empty and it slips to the floor. She then notices a body on the floor with Tomás' sack mask on. After unmasking the boy it turns out to be Simón who is dead. In a sickening revelation it is apparent that the day he went missing, in her frantic search for him, she'd unintentionally prevented his escape from the basement by blocking the hidden door with the metal poles stored in the closet that Simon had pushed away to gain access to Tomás' "small home", the place he ran to after their fight when she slapped him.
She carries his body up to the dormitory and proceeds to swallow all of her medication, begging aloud to be able to be with Simón again. As her eyes get heavy she sees that the lighthouse has been lit once again and is shining into the room, revealing that the five murdered child ghosts there. Simón is now alive in her arms and asks her to stay and take care of him and his friends forever and she agrees. The implication here is that she too is now dead, in the "neverneverland" of the Peter Pan story Simon asked her about earlier in the film; one of the ghost children says that she is like Wendy.
[edit] Principal cast
- Belén Rueda as Laura Jenkins
- Fernando Cayo as Carlos
- Roger Príncep as Simón
- Geraldine Chaplin as Aurora
- Montserrat Carulla as Benigna
- Mabel Rivera as Pilar
- Edgar Vivar as Balabán
- Andrés Gertrúdix as Andrés
[edit] Box office
- The Orphanage was immensely successful in Spain after an $8.3 million four-day launch from 350 screens. The supernatural mystery picture was the second highest-grossing debut ever for a local movie, the biggest opening of the year and 168 percent larger than the worldwide success Pan's Labyrinth.[2]
- Actual gross (January 6, 2008): $37,307,060 / €25,353,570
[edit] Awards and nominations
- Best Actress (Belen Rueda, nominee)
- Best Art Direction (Josep Rosell, winner)
- Best Costume Design (María Reyes, nominee)
- Best Director of Production (Sandra Hermida, winner)
- Best Editing (Elena Ruiz, nominee)
- Best Film (nominee)
- Best Makeup and Hair (Lola López/Itziar Arrieta, winner)
- Best New Director (Juan Antonio Bayona, tied winner)
- Best Original Score (Fernando Velázquez, nominee)
- Best Screenplay - Original (Sergio G. Sánchez, winner)
- Best Sound Mixing (Xavi Mas/Marc Orts/Oriol Tarragó, winner)
- Best Special Effects (Lluis Castells/Pau Costa/David Martí/Enric Masip/Montse Ribé/Jordi San Agustín, winner)
- Best Supporting Actress (Geraldine Chaplin, nominee)
- Best Breakthrough Actor (Roger Princep, nominee)
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Review at Working Author
- The Orphanage at the Internet Movie Database
- The Orphanage at Metacritic
- The Orphanage at Rotten Tomatoes
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