Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage is a fairy tale. How do I know this? It's the music. And some other stuff.
A quick note about why the music is so important here. The music — an integral part of every film — doesn't just enhance a film, it acts as a sort of dialog between the action and the viewer. 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jaws come to mind, indelible and enduring uses of music in film. The scores of these films transcend their original uses to embody either grand discovery (2001) or imminent danger (Jaws). I don't mean to suggest that The Orphanage has a score that is as enduring, but rather it uses conventions that tend to apply to more fanciful and less frightening films. In the way that the two classic films scores now connote something related to their respective films, the music in The Orphanage connotes a fairy tale. It is light and airy, a counterpoint to the tension that builds in the story. It's the foil to the building fright.
The Orphanage is a fairy tale in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm or Eastern European ones like Baba Yaga or Guillermo Del Toro (the producer), which is to say that it could also be called a ghost story. Del Toro has emerged as the leader of this type of fantastic film making. He's the epitome of this new genre of original fairy tellers. These fairy tales are for older children and adults, not unlike the traditional models listed before Del Toro. While Grimm's stories and tales like the gruesome Baba Yaga could be abridged or toned down for younger ears, The Orphanage cannot.
Like Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, the mystical world intermingles with the real, and characters either can or cannot see it. However, the grand effects and the rich palette of Pan's Labyrinth are gone here. What we get instead is a modern tale of loss and redemption...and never growing old. And a child with a creepy burlap sack on his head. Early in the film, Simon reads Peter Pan quietly to himself, sounding out words and trying to grasp their meaning. His family entertains itself in a rather old fashioned way, by reading — there is no TV. Laura (not Wendy), his mother, tries to help him figure out the meaning of the story, of growing up. We already know that he is incurably ill and that he is adopted, but we begin to understand that somehow he also knows. The subtext of this discussion is hardly subtext at all. In the following scene, Simon reveals after an exciting game of treasure hunting that he does know these secrets they've been keeping and doesn't understand them. That he disappears very soon afterward is not much of a surprise. That treasure hunt is fascinating — he's either revealing that he cleverly took and hid items so that finding them in the right order would lead to the treasure or his imaginary friends (ghosts?) did it. Either way, It's amazing and a little unnerving to watch.
Then there's the similarities to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining — another fairy tale about never growing old and a large historied building and ghosts. And a Wendy. Interestingly, both families have problems. Jack and Wendy are saddled with his alcoholism, his inability to hold down a teaching job, and a hypersensitive son. Laura and Carlos are struggling with Simon's illness and her own apparent one. Oh and each family has decided to take on a Herculean feat despite their challenges — the former manages a huge and isolate mountain resort through the winter and the latter is also going to be helping 5 or 6 other disabled children. More interestingly, both boys are able to see and interact with ghosts as are one of the parents. While Kubrick's Jack becomes a monster — the extreme incarnation of his alcoholic transformations — Bayona's Laura becomes more than a mother. She becomes the mother to all the lost boys or children. {Consider the bathroom scene right when Simon disappears for a visual quotation from The Shining. And think about how differently Jack acts in a similar scene.} I think another significant link is in the buildings. The Overlook Hotel and the orphanage seem alive, as characters in these fairy tales. Just as Jack seems to have always been at the hotel and will forever be, Laura seems to have always been at the orphanage. These buildings have appetites and appear to breathe or perhaps to digest. The boiler at The Overlook or the plumbing at the orphanage, these are the vital organs of these horrible places.
An orphanage is an interesting choice for setting this movie. Can you imagine little orphan Annie going back to her orphanage as an adult to renovate it and reopen it? That's what I find so interesting about the setting, Laura grows up and decides to return to her orphanage. I've never seen that in a film. We don't have to wait long, though, before all our preconceived notions about how scary an old orphanage should be are vindicated. That aside, the orphanage also provides the great device for setting off fairy tales — the parentless child. Great British fairy tales and films use WWII and the convention of sending children away from London to live with distant relatives during the bombing. One great series of fairy tales is C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, a series that has been revived by film adaptations, but they essentially work off of the parentless child. For that matter, consider Harry Potter, the odd and classic Bed Knobs and Broomsticks, and even The Goonies. The Orphanage doesn't fit the pattern perfectly as we're seeing Laura's point of view, but I think it relates to that genre. She is still very much the orphaned girl who was adopted in time to avoid a horrible fate.
That horrible fate should remain something of a surprise if you haven't seen The Orphanage. I will say that I doubt the resolution that is arrived at in the film, and I don't think it's important. It's a misdirection, in language of illusions, to keep our and Laura's eyes off Simon's vanishing act. This is a more complex film than I thought as I was watching it. That's an ideal isn't it. I enjoyed the spectacle and the simple shock of the ending, then I got to think of all this afterward. Netflix it.
