J. A. Bayona directs Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo and Geraldine Chaplin in this Spanish horror movie about a woman who buys the haunted orphanage where she grew up. 

Families dealing with grief. Doomed children. Supernatural manifestations of pain and recriminations. Bayona’s house style is becoming apparent. It will be interesting to see how much of it carries over, if any, to his Jurassic World sequel next week. This critically acclaimed debut is spooky and atmospheric. A little bit too in “good taste” and sophisticated to actually scare or shock. As a showcase for a powerful central turn by Rueda it matches The Innocents, The Haunting and The Others. It is a film more concerned with the sublime architecture and iconography of its puzzle than being a rollercoaster. And that is maybe where The Orphanage doesn’t quite meet expectations. There are just too many moving parts to its conundrums. The revelations about the death of malformed Tomás and what happened to the other orphans seem like plot devices to shunt things slightly forward. Clues to a mystery that only exists to be a mystery. There’s no pain or ethical fallout to these crimes. Maybe Bayona’s point is in the afterlife these things no longer matter. But dropping in such tragedies so casually, with little exploration, feels mechanical. And as well crafted as the tenser sequences are (an extreme injury following an accident, a game of creeping children called “Knock on the Door”, the CCTV monitor viewed exploration by Chaplin’s medium), they reveal a director more than capable of instilling dread in us but unwilling to exploit his powers to actually excite us.

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