Returning to the now-abandoned orphanage of her youth, Laura and her husband Carlos intend to reopen the facility as a center for sick and disabled children, a place where they can play in the open air and the nearby beach. One of the charges is the couple's seven-year-old son, Simon, dying from a degenerative illness. Shortly after arriving, Simon begins playing with imaginary friends, and Laura begins to find herself drawn into his world, which may have ties to her own childhood. When Simon mysteriously disappears, reality and fantasy begin to dissolve. In the end, much of what happens is open to interpretation, but "The Orphanage works best as a simple ghost story. Bayona finds terror in everything: the house, the weather, the geography. His is a stormy world in which people live like spiders, staring out from dark corners, the light more terrifying than the darkness that it sometimes illuminates. In a genre that has been battered by the cheap grotesqueries of special effects, it is a pleasure to be unsettled by something as simple as an invasive beam of light in the shadows of a haunted house." (Seattle Post-Intelligencier) More at theorphanagemovie.com 35mm Cinemascope
2007, color, 1 hour 50 minutes, Mexico/Spain