The Orphanage (2007 film)

The Orphanage
Spanish Promotional Poster
Directed by	Juan Antonio Bayona
Written by	Sergio G. Sánchez
Produced by	Mar Targarona Joaquín Padro Álvaro Agustín Guillermo del Toro
Starring	Belén Rueda Geraldine Chaplin Fernando Cayo Mabel Rivera Roger Príncep Montserrat Carulla Edgar Vivar
Cinematography	Óscar Faura
Edited by	Elena Ruiz
Music by	Fernando Velázquez
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures Picturehouse
Release dates	11 October, 2007 28 December, 2007 (limited) 11 January, 2008 (open) 14 February, 2008 21 March, 2008
Running time	105 min.
Country	Spain
Language	Spanish

The Orphanage (Spanish title: El orfanato) is a 2007 Spanish horror/suspense/drama film. It stars Belén Rueda as Laura, a woman who returns to the orphanage where she stayed for a period as a child. She purchases the house, with plans to turn it into a home for disabled children. Everything seems to be going well for Laura, her husband Carlos (Cayo) and their son Simón (Príncep). However, the parents soon realize their son has an imaginary friend and horror begins to unfold.

The film is directed by Juan Antonio Bayona and produced by the spanish production company Rodar & Rodar co-produced by Telecinco and presented by the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. The film opened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 20, 2007. It opened Spain's Sitges Film Festival on October 4, 2007. The film opened in limited release in the United States on December 28, 2007. It went into wide release in the U.S. on January 11, 2008.

The Orphanage was chosen by the Spanish Academy of Films as Spain's nominee for the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, but ultimately did not end up as one of the five final nominees in that category.

The film was nominated for 14 Goya Awards, including Best Picture. It won seven.

In 2007, New Line Cinema bought the rights to produce an English-language remake.

Plot

Laura, with her physician husband Carlos, returns to an orphanage where she had lived as a child with plans of reopening it as a home for sick and disabled children. They adopted a son named Simón who is HIV-positive, though he is unaware of either his adoption or his illness.

Upon moving into the cavernous and hauntingly beautiful home, Laura takes Simón to visit a cave near the beach, and he claims to see an imaginary friend. After returning home, he draws a picture of him. He is named Tomás, and he wears a sack mask. Because Simón has always had imaginary friends, both Laura and Carlos play along with his stories. Simón later says that he has become acquainted with six imaginary friends.

A mysterious social worker appears one day, talking obliquely of some new treatment for Simón. After inviting her in for tea, Laura becomes suspicious and sends her away. That night, after investigating some rattling noises she hears outside, Laura finds the mysterious social worker skulking around the grounds. Though Laura screams for Carlos' help, the woman escapes before anything else occurs. After reporting the incident, it is discovered that there is no social worker registered with the name Benigna, which the woman gave.

One day, Simón tells Laura about a game that Tomás has created for him, a type of scavenger hunt. The game leads them to the locked drawer where Simón's medical records are hidden. Simón reveals to Laura that he knows that she is not his real mother and that he is going to die. When she asks him how he knows that, he responds that his friends told him.

Soon after, Laura hosts a party for the disabled children to welcome them to their new home. Simón begs to show Laura Tomás' house, but after an argument, and a slap on the face in the spur of the moment, Laura leaves Simón alone upstairs. Back in the garden, she notices a boy with a sack mask, a lot like the picture that Simón drew after their visit to the cave. When Laura returns to check on him, she cannot find him. She checks in the bathroom at the end of the hall, only to be confronted by a boy in a sack mask who she saw earlier at the party. After she tries to remove the boy's mask, he violently locks her in the bathroom, injuring her, and disappears. No one else at the party remembered seeing the boy because all the children were wearing masks. Simón cannot be found; he has simply disappeared without a trace.

Months later, Laura and her husband go for a drive. It is evident that both are still haunted by the loss of their son. At a traffic light, they are surprised by Benigna crossing the street with a pram in front of them. However, in the tension of the moment, a speeding ambulance completely mauls Benigna. Laura, in a panic, checks under the ambulance that killed Benigna, thinking Simón was in the pram. Instead, she finds a doll that looks like Tomás, with his mask on. Laura then rushes to the scene of the accident. And barely see's Carlos attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Benigna. After a few moments, he says that the woman is dead. Laura reaches for the woman's whistle necklace, and in her dying breath the woman snatches Laura's hand away.

After searching the woman's home, the police discover that Benigna worked at the orphanage long ago. She had a deformed son named Tomás who drowned in the oceanfront cave near the orphanage. Though his face was hidden from the other orphans, they led him to a cave and took off his mask. They wanted to see if he would dare to come out without his mask; ashamed, he refused and drowned overnight once the tide rose.

The desperate Laura then agrees to have a medium explore the orphanage for supernatural clues to her son's disappearance. The medium sees five child ghosts, screaming in pain and dying of poison. The medium reveals that the reason she can see the dead is that she is close to death herself. Laura begs the medium to tell her how she can find her son - the medium replies that she must use her grief as strength to help her find him, but it all depends on how far she wants to go. Soon after, Laura, following clues she believes were left by Tomás, finds five sacks full of ashes and human bones in the very shed that she caught Benigna snooping in. Laura surmises that the woman had murdered the five children, after their trick had killed Tomás.

Carlos does not believe in the supernatural; he thinks his wife has gone crazy and begs her to leave the orphanage, but she refuses. She insists that she must stay and explore every nook and cranny of the creepy house until it disgorges its secrets. Laura insists that there are too many memories in the house and she needs two days alone to say good-bye.

Carlos goes, leaving Laura alone in the house. After recreating her time in the house as a young girl with the help from some footage of the orphanage that police had found at Begnina's house, she sees the ghosts of the dead friends from her childhood, and they lead her to a hidden door in a closet. Behind the door are stairs leading to a dark basement, and at the bottom she supposedly finds Simón alive and hugs him to her in a blanket. However, when she wills the ghosts to go away, she realises the blanket is empty and it slips to the floor. She then notices a body on the floor, which seemed like Tomás. After unmasking the boy, it turns out to be Simón, who is dead as well, having fallen down a broken banister on the stairwell the day he disappeared. In a sickening revelation it is apparent that his falling from the banister was a sound Laura heard earlier in the film, and that months ago in her frantic search for Simón, she'd unintentionally prevented his escape from the basement.

She carries his body up to the dormitory and kills herself by overdosing on her medication.

Laura awakens, in what seems to be the afterlife, and the ghosts of the five murdered children plus Tomás and Simón, appear before her. Simón asks her to stay and take care of him and his friends forever, and she agrees.

Later, Carlos is seen in front of the house where a memorial to Laura, Simón, and the other children of the orphanage had been built. After going inside one last time to say farewell, he spies a good-luck necklace he had given Laura earlier, on the floorboards inside the children's bedroom. He hears a noise and looks up as the doors swing softly open, and he slowly smiles.

Principal cast

• Belén Rueda as Laura Jenkins
• Fernando Cayo as Carlos
• Roger Príncep as Simón
• Geraldine Chaplin as Aurora
• Montserrat Carulla as Benigna
• Mabel Rivera as Pilar
• Edgar Vivar as Balabán
• Andrés Gertrúdix as Andrés

Box office

• The Orphanage was immensely successful in Spain after an $8.3 million four-day launch from 350 screens. The supernatural mystery picture was the second highest-grossing debut ever for a local movie, the biggest opening of the year and 168 percent larger than the worldwide success Pan's Labyrinth.
• Actual gross (January 6, 2008): $37,307,060 / €25,353,570

Awards and nominations

Goya Awards

• Best Actress (Belen Rueda, nominee)
• Best Art Direction (Josep Rosell, winner)
• Best Costume Design (María Reyes, nominee)
• Best Director of Production (Sandra Hermida, winner)
• Best Editing (Elena Ruiz, nominee)
• Best Film (nominee)
• Best Makeup and Hair (Lola López/Itziar Arrieta, winner)
• Best New Director (Juan Antonio Bayona, tied winner)
• Best Original Score (Fernando Velázquez, nominee)
• Best Screenplay - Original (Sergio G. Sánchez, winner)
• Best Sound Mixing (Xavi Mas/Marc Orts/Oriol Tarragó, winner)
• Best Special Effects (Lluis Castells/Pau Costa/David Martí/Enric Masip/Montse Ribé/Jordi San Agustín, winner)
• Best Supporting Actress (Geraldine Chaplin, nominee)
• Best Breakthrough Actor (Roger Princep, nominee)

External links

• The Orphanage at IMDb
• The Orphanage at Metacritic
• The Orphanage at Rotten Tomatoes