The Orphanage

Sooooooooooooooo scary! Seriously, I haven't been anywhere close to this scared from a movie since The Others, and even that movie wasn't all that scary so much as it just made me tingly when there was the big reveal and I realized what was going on. Like The Others, a lot of what's so effective about this movie is its commitment to atmosphere. I wonder, also, if a part of the reason is that it ultimately only had one big scary scene? Most of the movie was just buildup to this scene, either establishing the atmosphere or whatever, and even though I guess other scenes might be considered scary, there definitely is that one scene that made the guy in the theater behind me go, "AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH HOOOOOOOOOLLLLLYYYYYYYSHIT!" I appreciated that guy a lot. I almost wonder if he was paid by the movie people to be there, except that I went to this at a late night showing on a random Saturday night well after it'd been out for several weeks, so I can't imagine they would actually have paid someone to be there to do that. I don't know why I actually bothered to refute that idea...

Aside from the whole commitment to that one absolute scary scene being the reason for that scene's total scariness, the other theory I concocted for why it works is that it's such a primally scary scene: alone in a dark house at night, wide open room behind you, if you're at all ever scared of the dark like I am sometimes you've swung your head around and expected there to be a ghost behind you. Well, that actually is what happens here. Kudos for tying in the childhood game they're playing at the beginning as well, which I thought was totally creepy when they were doing at first anyway, before they were little ghost children. But, god, they did it perfectly. She turns around and there is a fucking ghost child!

I didn't get the gore with the old lady, really, though. It seemed like the one thing that really kind of broke away from the atmosphere of the movie. She got nailed by the bus, which was a total cheap shock just like they pulled in that Final Destination movie, fine, it was cheap but whatever... But then why the flash of her destroyed face? They cover it up first and you get just the vaguest hint that her face has been mangled by the fact that mouth-to-mouth guy has blood all over his face, that seemed bad enough and really, to me, kept with the way the movie was playing with your imagination a lot. But then the cloth gets pulled away and we get to see the really great work some make-up artist or set-design person or somebody did creating this gruesome smashed face, and we make a little "oh gross" gurgle, and then we wonder why we had to just see that. The only thing I could think of was that they were trying to unsettle us in a different way, like throwing in a body blow after a long series of precise jabs just to throw off our defenses a little (I don't know anything about boxing). All it did for me was make me think for a brief moment that the movie was going to go somewhere way more gruesome than I expected it to, which felt like kind of a let down. I'm glad I wasn't let down in the end.

Some people might think the weird fake smiley ending with the husband looking up and smiling at what might be ghost of his wife entering the room was a little cheesy, and it was, but I didn't think it took anything away and it was just denouement anyway. Plus, it was totally the police counselor showing up all happy that his wife was dead, not his wife's ghost. I'm sure of it.