NYFF: The Orphanage

By Katey Rich

Beln Rueda stars in The Orphanage

One of the neater and more relaxed aspects of the New York Film Festival is their midnight screening selection. Usually the source for high-class, prestige films, the festival cuts loose at the witching hour and screens films that, while very good on their own merits, might have a little more in common with the grindhouse midnight screenings of old.

The first weekend's midnight show, The Orphanage, takes the horror standard of a haunted house to new, emotionally resonant levels. The film by first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona is presented by Guillermo del Toro, who pulled off a similar feat by making fantasy an Oscar-winner with last year's Pan's Labyrinth. Bayona's film hews much closer to its genre roots than the transcendent Labyrinth, but provides the combination of thrills and genuine storytelling that American directors seem to have forgotten about lately.

The child in the sack mask who haunts Laura in the film.

Bayona and del Toro had been friends for years before Bayona, who had previous experience in shorts, decided to take on Sergio Sanchez's screenplay. Bayona went to his old friend to ask for help in making the film happen, as he explained in the press conference following the film's screening. "He created space for us so we could do the film as we wanted without having to restrict ourselves. He was very, very sensitive to the needs of another director. He did make many suggestions, but I have to say we didn't pay much attention to them. He was very nice about that, actually. What was important to him was that we made the film that was in our heads, that what we wanted to make appeared onscreen."

The emotional and dramatic crux of the film is Beln Rueda's performance as Laura, a woman who grew up in an idyllic orphanage and returns there with her husband and son Simn, hoping to open the home to children with disabilities. Laura's life is turned upside down when her son disappears, and she retreats further into the mysteries and ghosts of the house to find her son and the unexamined secrets of her childhood.

Rueda threw herself fearlessly into the role both onscreen and off; her powerful evocation of a grieving mother came about both from her experience as a mother and research done with grief-support groups. "At first you begin to put a lot of your own experiences, memories, thoughts into the creation of the role," Rueda said. "Then there's a point where you meet people who have been through those experiences. That was really important to me, to see that full range of hope and despair, to get a handle on the experiences of the people who have been through that."

Laura' mental state deteriorates as she delves deeper into the secrets of the house.

Bayona spoke extensively about his goals in creating the character of Laura, a devoted mother who begins to lose her grip on reality and responsibility as she becomes more desperate to find Simn. "People spoke about Peter Pan [references in the film], and perhaps there's nothing sadder in Peter Pan than the image of the mother sitting by the window waiting for them to come back. More than the mother, though, [Laura] becomes Wendy. What I was trying to do was create the idea of an irresponsible heroine. That was much more what I was after in this character than the classic sort of character that you get in horror films."

"We focused more on the research of the character of Laura, what it's like to lose a child," Sanchez said about the writing process. "We had meetings with people who had kids who disappear. That's the kind of research that we were more interested in. I think what's really interesting in the movie is the grieving of the mother."

The inspiration that Bayona found in old American melodramas likely contributed to his fine sense of Laura's character. "For this film, more than, say, other horror films, I had in mind melodramas, especially the melodramas of David Lean. I think something horror films have in common with melodramas is both of them find a way of visualizing, onscreen, emotions. I studied the films of David Lean and melodramas for exactly that reason."

Still more a horror film than a melodrama�I confess to seeing about half the film through my fingers, terrified of what was coming next�The Orphanage is spine-tingling in all the best, intelligent ways. Spoiler alert: No limbs will be hacked off, no one will be tortured, and there is (almost) no blood. Just the way we like it.

This image will probably give you nightmares.