The Orphanage: Rating: 2.5 stars

Lady, what do you expect? You bought an orphanage. It can’t end well.

The Orphanage (2007)
2007 · R · Horror
Reviewed June 2, 2008

Let’s play a game. Say you have a lot of money, and you want to do something fun with it. Do you:

  1. buy a Wii
  2. buy a new car
  3. buy the creepy old orphanage where you grew up

Now let’s say your kid is acting really, really weird. This probably has something to do with:

  1. his daily sugar intake
  2. his hormones
  3. his imaginary friends who stage unsettling (and seemingly unimaginary) scavenger hunts, telling him things you don’t want him to know, and making creepy noises all around the house

Given the situation, you should probably:

  1. ignore the kid; it’s a stage he’ll grow out of
  2. cut back on his sugar intake
  3. accuse him of playing tricks on you and lying about his imaginary friends, then ignore his protestations until it is TOO LATE, TOO LATE, AIEEEEE TOO LATE

If you picked #3 for each of those questions, you are the heroine of this film. She’s your typical oblivious horror-film parent: involved enough to know something’s up with her young son, but dense enough not to understand that creepy old houses where lots of little kids have died never bring anything but EEEEVIL. Movies like this are either very creepy or very dull, as we wait for the protagonist to catch up with us and realize that OF COURSE the house is haunted, OF COURSE the kid sees ghosts, OF COURSE the evil dead are out to get you. But, in a well-made horror film, the scares are paced well enough to keep us on the edges of our seats while we wait for the light to dawn.

This film looked promising, but it just didn’t deliver. It was less creepy-scary than jump-scary — instead of a good, sustained aura of eeriness building up into terror, there were loud noises and sudden shocks and people getting hit by buses when you least expect them to. This is fine for people who haven’t seen many horror films, but anyone who’s seen The Others or The Exorcist will see it all coming from far, far away. There was one scene that gave me the shivers — let’s just say I don’t play games that encourage small children to creep up on me from behind — but other than that, it was all rather tepid. The ending, in particular, was a twisty cop-out — it was clichèd, then kind of awesome, and then went right back to clichèd again. All in all, I can’t really recommend it. It was a lot to sit through for almost no scares at all.