The Orphanage

Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage uses tried-and-true horror conventions — an isolated cliffside, worn rag dolls with porcelain heads, a soundtrack laden with screeching strings — to sound a deep chord about memory and how individuals negotiate forays into a painful past to be able to live with themselves in the present. With this, his debut film, Bayona establishes himself among a new generation of Spanish filmmakers that eschew the quirkiness of Pedro Almodóvar, whose aesthetic virtually defined Spanishness in films for the last two decades, in favor of the internationally flavored approach of Alejandro Amenábar, whose supremely unsettling Tesis resurrected a moribund Spanish film scene in the mid-1990s (which he would follow with his own brand of appealing suspense flicks such as Abre los ojos and The Others). The Orphanage is in this same better-than-just-scary tradition; set in modern-day Spain, Bayona's film speaks volumes about how a country imagines itself.

Laura — played with startling conviction by Belén Rueda, her face becoming more and more rutted by worry lines as the film progresses — moves her husband Carlos and their young adopted son Simón into the house in which Laura grew up as an orphan 30 years prior, pluckily determined to transform the dusty old mansion into a residence for handicapped children. Laura's selflessness stems in part from Simón's condition as HIV-positive, a detail that adds one of the movie's few outwardly modern touches. After making a number of the same mistakes every horror movie heroine must commit — not cleaning out the house's closets when she moves in, allowing her son to wander into a cave unaccompanied, trying to unmask someone with a burlap sack over his head (I mean, really!) — Simón goes missing, to be replaced by a cadre of youthful undead lost souls who egg Laura into playing protracted scavenger hunts in order to find her son. Not even gorgeous shots of northern Spain's rocky coastline can combat the darkness that begins to overwhelm Laura, as understanding the link between her son's disappearance and the unwelcome guests in her house becomes her singular obsession.

In the meantime, Carlos assumes the role of skeptic to this supernatural mayhem, scoffing as a team of paranormal investigators sets up shop in the orphanage to determine who these dead kids are and what they want. Bayona establishes a firm divide between the believers and the doubters in the story: Those who think digging up the past results in a better understanding of what's going on in the present and those who would rather leave dead kids lie. As millions of Spanish moviegoers were riveted to The Orphanage last year, making it into the nation's top-grossing movie, the Spanish government was passing a Law of Historical Memory and families across the country were excavating mass graves from the Spanish Civil War in search of the remains of loved ones. Whether Bayona and screenwriter Sergio Sánchez were conscious of this connection to their country's continuing quest to grapple with the mysteries and oppression of its past is up for grabs, but the suggestion is nonetheless clear. In the climactic sequence, Laura recreates the orphanage of her youth — making up the orphan's beds and playing a round of Spanish kick-the-can ("Un, dos, tres, chocolate inglés") with her son's deceased playmates — literally returning to the past with the aim of answering the questions that still plague her in the here and now. Like Spain itself, Laura's foray back in time allows her to make startling discoveries that raise as many uncertainties as they answer, leaving the audience with a curiously macabre happy ending.

With Guillermo del Toro — a director who has made waves with his particular recipe of Spain, children and creepiness — stamping his approval on Bayona's first film, The Orphanage made it to screens in the States (blink and you missed it, but it was here). Perhaps even more importantly, though, Bayona is the latest to, for better or worse depending on which cinephile you ask, reinvigorate Spanish cinema, this time with a jolt of Hollywood. Put aside your bias against his use of suspense-movie conventions that will nevertheless succeed in freaking you out, and you'll find a film as thoughtful as it is spooky.