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The Orphanage directed by Juan Antonio Bayona is the latest moody emotionally intense Spanish horror movie. Ever being a lot of those coming out lately as a specialty of the new Spanish cinema, ghost stories that use some of the old Gothic supernatural machinery of classic horror films to tell more emotionally resident deeper richer stories. Unfortunately, this one is not really as rich as deep as The Devil’s Backbone, or the others. Instead, it’s a rather pedestrian story that’s pretty well done for all bad. Billian Reada plays a woman who returns to the orphanage where she grew up with her young adopted son and her husband. And gradually she starts discovering imaginary friends. Strange things start happening. Creepy children show up at the end of hallways.

And this woman is drawn back into her past into a secret that happened on the ground of that orphanage many years before. There is nothing terribly new or surprising about this story, but it is skillfully done. I think I was a little disappointed by The Orphanage because my expectation has been raised by some of the other Spanish films that do a lot more with the shoran. In the end it’s a kind of sentimental sixth sense like feeling to this but the emotions are really as deeper as rich or as interesting as some of the visual effects which are nonetheless effective. They do give you a scare.