EL ORFANATO

(Picturehouse)
Directed by: Juan Antonio Bayona
Runtime: 105 min

Bored of Indonesian horrors which will make you sick to the core? This thing will cure your lust on gaspy and elegant chilling moments. Although most of the actual gaspy moments are on the soft side, the film does have quite away with sudden shocks. The backbone for this flick is surely the strong performance by Belén Rueda as Laura, who carries the entire film in a slick manner reminding you of any lead actress on Hitchcock movies.

Laura (Belen Rueda) as a young girl was raised in the orphanage before being adopted. Now in her 30s, she has returned with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their young son Simon (Roger Princep) to buy the orphanage where she once lived and run it as a home for sick or disabled children. But it was not an ordinary orphanage, some dark secrets revealed. Simon has imaginary friends one of them is a boy with a sack over his head. But is it his imagination or has something terrible happened on that orphanage long time ago?

The line between reality and fantasy is so blurred in the film which will make viewers scratch their heads as the credits rolled but this film is undeniably chilling without any gore and scary without being cheap.

If some elements are familiar for you, like dark corners of the house, bleeding nightmares, grotesque truth and quiet scenes which leads up into a shocking moment, that means Guillermo Del Toro was here, and indeed he was the producer of this Spanish smash hit.