Don't you hate in movies when they say "Quentin Tarantino Presents..." when you know they had absolutely nothing to do with the actual production of the movie? Well The Orphanage had the tag "Guillermo Del Toro Presents.." in front of it and you can tell he had something to do with it. Probably because he produced the film, but i digress. The Orphanage is a Spanish film directed by Juan Antonio Bayona whom i have never heard of until this film. You can tell he took a lot of his directing style from Guillermo himself and this movie i thought was shot beautifully, it had the nice wide shots when they needed to be there. And the close shots to show the suspense of the film.
This film is being marketed as a horror film and i just do not see the horror in this film at all, if you read a lot of other reviews they say the same thing, i would consider it more of a suspense/fantasy film if anything. It basically follows the character named Laura who buys the home she was previously an orphan at to make it into an orphanage with her husband Carlos and son Simon. Simon then starts to make some invisible friends who later turn out to be the ghosts of the kids Laura was orphans with. The acting in this film i thought was phenomenal, and its obviously hard to rate the dialog as the entire movie is in Spanish but everything that was spoken seemed alright with me.
Where i thought this movie lacked was that i tried to compare it too much to Pans Labyrinth and you cannot. Pans Labyrinth is MILES ahead of this film and thats where i think it lacked. The story i thought was OK, it seemed a little slow for my taste in some parts and some scenes felt like they dragged on for too long. I can see why people absolutely love this film because do not get me wrong, it is an excellent film but just some of the unnecessary shots and long scenes really took me out of the experience. There were a few suspenseful and jumpy moments in the film which is why im guessing people are classifying it as horror but thats not what the overall film was about.
The ending, like most movies is what sold me on this though, it was a very taboo ending and left you thinking for a little bit. It had a lot of heart to it too, especially the final scene of the film, i do not want to give anything away but its really touching. Another element that bugged me a bit was the score. It seemed a little too familiar to me, like it was being ripped off. Even at some points in the movie it felt a little out of place, made you think, "why are they putting this music in, during THIS scene?".
Overall, the goods outweigh the bads in this film, i enjoyed it and even if you did like Pans Labyrinth, i highly recommend checking this out. A good start to 2008
8/10
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