"THIS IS THE ONLY SCRIPT I'VE read where I thought: 'If (the director] gets injured – and believe me, I tried to make that happen – I'd like to make this film.'" Pan's Labyrinth's Guillermo del Toro there, joking around on the DVD extras of The Orpha
nage about how he wanted to wrest the project away from his protégé, 32-year-old director Juan Antonio Bayona.
Thanks to his above-the-title "presents" credit and the fact that this creepy Spanish ghost story is very much in keeping with his visual sensibility, viewers would be forgiven for thinking the Mexican auteur was the one calling the shots anyway. That's not to detract from the sterling job first-timer Bayona has done in making a genuinely scary horror film; it merely reflects the positive influence del Toro's huge success is having on a genre dominated of late by torture porn and sub-par Japanese horror.
What's great about The Orphanage is that it ratchets up old genre staples such as anxiety and suspense to palm-sweating levels of intensity, not by subverting horror conventions, but by capitalising on our knowledge of them to tell a moving, character-based story that makes us care about the protagonists. That story revolves around Laura (Belén Rueda), a mother on a desperate quest to find what has happened to her terminally ill son who has gone missing in their new home – the former orphanage where Laura spent her childhood.
Set in a big house full of creaking floorboards and skeletons in closets, the film is part of a great tradition of ghost stories stretching back to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and its classic film adaptation, The Innocents, where the line between what's real and imagined is blurred by grief and trauma. Like Pan's Labyrinth, however, the film also uses children's tales – specifically Peter Pan – to connect the spirit world to the actual world in a melancholic, moving way that makes the suspension of disbelief needed to ensure these kinds of films work possible. As the medium investigating the orphanage tells Laura: "Seeing is not believing, it's the other way around."
That's probably not a bad way to approach films about the war in Iraq either. Given the number of lies that have been disseminated about the war by the US government, seeing what you believe might be the truth, and believing what you see when it's presented as the truth, have become problematic concepts to wrap your head around. That may be one of the reasons Brian De Palma's angry polemic, Redacted, doesn't quite work. Based on a real atrocity perpetrated by US troops against some Iraqi civilians, it is presented as a "fictional documentary" and makes use of the increasingly ubiquitous "found footage" device to tell its story through such media as YouTube-style posts, security-cam footage and news reports.
His purpose is presumably to make us question what we see and evaluate the different ways it can be spun, but whether by accident or design, his film is rarely believable. Efforts to recreate reality through alternative image sources don't look authentic and his cast isn't skilled enough to inject their stock characters with a sense of life beyond their function in this film. Too bad, as this is one of the few anti-war films that doesn't cop out with a "support the troops" message. Here, they're as culpable as the administration for their actions.
The full article contains 589 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
