Cybersurfing: Eyeing “The Orphanage”
In a combination of review and interview at EyeWeekly.Com, Jason Anderson proclaims:
Elegantly rendered and effectively spooky, The Orphanage courts the same viewers that may or may not have much love for genre movies but still happily lost themselves in Pan’s Labyrinth — in other words, folks too classy to admit to seeing a Wishmaster movie. In fact, Guillermo Del Toro had more than a spectral presence in this first feature by Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona. Del Toro and Bayona met 14 years ago at the Sitges fantasy film fest. The director of Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos kept tabs on his friend’s budding movie career, eventually agreeing to not only co-produce The Orphanage but endorse it with the “Guillermo Del Toro Presents…” that appears in the marketing.
In an interview with Bayona and The Orphanage’s star Belén Rueda at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the director says that the films have another important connection. “We were both focused on the idea of how people make fiction to understand their reality,” says Bayona. “I didn’t know we shared this because Guillermo was editing Pan’s Labyrinth while we were working on ours.”
And though both movies combine elements of horror, fantasy and psychological drama, The Orphanage is a less radical departure from genre tropes, drawing from a tradition of ghost stories that stems from Henry James’ 1898 chiller The Turn of the Screw. Rueda stars as Laura, a woman who returns with her husband and young son to open a school in the orphanage where she was raised. Various strange occurrences and one tragic event lead Laura to investigate the mysteries of the place and of her past.
While The Orphanage is reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw and such cinematic kin as The Innocents and The Others, Bayona says that fully conveying Laura’s story was more important than worrying about reference points. “Everything was so strong about this character and her journey,” he says, adding that “what started like a scary movie ended like a melodrama.”
Related posts:
- Orphanage interviews The Montreal Mirror has posted “Sadness and the Supernatural,” an...
- Analyzing the subtle terror of “The Orphanage” There are a couple of interesting articles available today that...
- Inviting Audiences to “The Orphanage” Reuters has an interesting article about Picturehouse Entertainment’s efforts to...
- A Scary Orphanage FantasyMoguls.Com has a post that previews upcoming art house releases,...
- Film Review: The Orphanage The ghost story is such an ancient form of storytelling...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.