?El Orfanato? (The Orphanage, 2007)
Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona
MANILA, Philippines - Lovers of supernatural tales will find the haunting and familiar templates in ?The Orphanage?: a large and old gothic house by the sea, winding staircases, musty bedrooms, hidden corridors and basements; the past haunting the present; the protagonists unaware of the evil forces lurking behind every nook and cranny of the old house still embedded with the psychic elements of its previous inhabitants.
But in this psychological thriller what touches deeply and delights is the bare-bones fact that a mother?s love can indeed overcome all odds, even beyond the grave.
Laura (Belen Rueda) is an orphan who had a happy childhood, in spite of living in an orphanage. She was soon adopted and left the big house illuminated at night by an old lighthouse.
Thirty years later, she returns to that orphanage as its new owner. Now married to a doctor, Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and having a 10-year-old son, Simón (Roger Princep), she plans to renovate the huge house and open it as a place for special children.
Simón, being an only child, feeds on his loneliness and acquires many imaginary friends, among them Tomás (Oscar Casas), who tells him things.
The appearance of Benigna (Montserrat Carulla), an elderly, bespectacled matron in the front steps of the house with incriminating documents about Simón?s true identity throws Laura into a panic that becomes a whirling vortex of fear, anger, bewilderment and finally, a descent into desperation.
Simón?s sudden disappearance increases the tension, and as the story unfolds, Laura is forced to come face to face, literally and figuratively, with the choice of whether to stay and confront the reality of what the house and its occupants?real or imagined? have to tell her; or to leave, without her child.
The intense suspense, at times reaching an almost-breaking point, gives one no time to breathe; and as suddenly the tension slackens, only to return to an even more taut scenario.
This tightening and loosening of emotional strings make for a satisfying decrescendo, when finally everything becomes crystal clear: maternal love, whether that of Laura?s, or Benigna?s, shall prevail? beyond life, and even beyond the grave.
Filmed in an isolated coastal town in Northern Spain with the brooding sea and its treacherous tidal changes, natural cave and rock formation, the atmosphere is a perfect backdrop for the events that unfold slowly but surely?a mid-40s couple looking forward to a long life together, and raising their son in this quiet seaside place.
Like the sea that brings in detritus from afar, Laura?s past comes back to her in a manner that is not only surprising but frightening, needing the help of the medium Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin) to cross the boundary between the living and the dead.
Like the small, ghostly hand that suddenly touches Laura by the shoulders as she plays her childhood game of uno, dios, tres, toca la pared, the movie will not only surprise us by the genuine and raw feelings of the characters, but also our own reactions to them, mining the hitherto?unknown but fierce emotions of our own subconscious minds.
Alice M. Sun-Cua, a poet and a physician, is at work on translating the poetry of Jaime Gil de Biedma. Her two books are ?Riding Towards the Sunrise and Other Travel Essays? (Anvil, 2000) and ?Charted Prophesies and other Poems? (DLSU Press, 2001).
