The Orphanage

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about The Orphanage, but I suspect that I can't quite give it the a-ok. Which makes me feel guilty. I mean, here we have an honest-to-goodness earnest attempt at making a serious, mature, well-shot horror film, with fleshed out characters, complex themes, heavy atmosphere, that takes it's time and tries to build real suspense. Pretty much exactly the kind of horror movie I'm always begging for. I guess the operative word, though, is "attempt," because I'm not convinced it's too successful at reaching its goals.

It left me at times a little bored, and in the end unsatisfied. Where as a lot of less-artisitc, atmosphere-lacking, suspense-free Friday the 13th movies have given me a much better time at the movies. It's like I tried some new, fancy expensive Belgian Ale that I should love, only it wasn't all that good and I'd rather have a Pabst Blue Ribbon. I feel a bit like an uncultured ass for not liking it, but I gotta remind myself of all the good, sophisticated horror films I do love.

OK, let me try this from a different angle. You know what I don't want to see again in a horror movie? A precocious little kid who tells his parents about his imaginary friends, and then the kid starts behaving strangely and weird things are afoot and the parents become worried that the kid is losing his shit. Because the moment a kid in a horror movie says he has an imaginary friend, a little bell goes off in my head and I immediately know that this will be an important plot point and that his friends are most certainly not imaginary. They are most likely ghosts, or I guess there was that one shitty Rober DeNiro movie where he had a split personality that befriended Dakota Fanning. (Don't read that last sentance if you wanted to see Hide and Seek.) So right there, all the suspense for the first act is gone, because we never for a second worry that the kid is just looney tunes, we know he's telling the truth.

Hey, that would be something though... how about a horror movie that actually makes us wonder if the kid is a nutjob? I'll still let the answer to the mystery be "ghosts" if you really want it to be, but maybe we just don't have the kid talk about his imaginary friends, or at least not until later in the picture. That way it might actually be a little spookier when a little kid in a fucked-up mask starts running around the house.

Let me digress off my digression here for one second about that fucked-up mask. It's really damn eerie, and one of the coolest things in the movie. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. It's suppossed to be a mask that was worn by a little kid to hide his deformed face. I'm guessing this was done to avoid embarassment and prevent him from scaring other children... but then why the hell would his mother make the mask way, way scarier than his actual face? You think she would have made him a cute mask or something, not the weird, lopsided, clown/rapist nightmare he wears. Ick.

OK, digression over.

I'm also not keen on mediums and ghost hunters popping up in horror films to create some additional suspense scenes and I guess to try to lend some realism or science to the story. In fact, I'm not inherently into ghost stories, so you're already asking me to swallow a lot in believing that there is an afterlife and that ghosts have magical powers and also they still wear clothes (are their clothes the ghosts of their clothes when they were alive?) and they can talk so I guess they have, like, fully functioning organs and a voice box and shit otherwise I'm not sure how they generate sound, and they are intangible sometimes and solid others, and there don't seem to be any rules and they do a lot of arbitrary spooky things. I'm willing to go along with that, if the movie is a good one. But then if you throw in psychics and pseudo-science and it gets to be too much for me.

Actually, you know what, I'll even accept psychics and mediums, even though they are horseshit too, because this is a movie and not real life and fantastical shit is cool. But ghost hunters have to be the corniest, stupidest group of pseudo-scientific charlatans ever and I will not tolerate any treatment of them in a serious light. You gotta go the 1408 route and acknowledge that their profession is silly (even if there really are ghosts in the movie), otherwise save it for Ghostbusters 3. To The Orphanage's credit, some of the characters are skeptical of the ghost hunter guys, but the scene is still played as seriously creepy and it seems like the movie ultimately falls in their favor.

Then there's the ending, which struck me as too pat and maybe upbeat. I mean, I don't object to a horror movie having a happy ending, because sometimes it can provide a very satisfying catharsis. But the ending here borders on corny, and then makes the rest of the movie seem not-scary in retrospect. I mean, seriously, when you think about what happens at the end, you realize that there was nothing to fear the whole time.

There are definitely some effective scenes and images and ideas at play here, it strikes the right tone, it actually tries to flesh out the characters. I've been trying to decide whether or not to give it a 2 or 3 on Netflix, and I'm considering the 3 just because I have a lot of respect for what The Orphanage is trying to do. But I don't think it works.

I've rambled on a lot, but if I could sum everything up into one main point for what didn't work for me, I would say it's the complexity of the story. After watching Them the other night, and then seeing this one, it's clear to me that simplicity is often a virtue in a horror movie. With Them, there's a lean efficiency to the suspense... oh shit, someone's in our house and they are trying to kill us. That's all, there's no more "plot" to speak of, and it's enough to get your blood pumping. The Orphange has so many different elements to it... the creepy kid, imaginary friends, weird mask, ghosts, videos of an old orphanage, a murderous caregiver, a creepy old house full of secrets, ghost hunters, a psychic, on and on. Much of it is well done, but I'm not sure the complexity makes the movie scarier. The most effective scenes of tension really could succeed with or without the complicated plot. It doesn't reach Neil Jordan's In Dreams levels of convoluted, distracting storytelling, but I think maybe there's still more going on than neccesary. I can even understand the need for a central mystery, which can add a spooky sense of the unknown, but I don't see how having this much plot makes the movie any more effective.

I'm still debating how to rate this on Netflix, but it's starting to fall into There Will Be Blood territory of uncertainty. I guess I appreciated the effort much more than the final product.