It's been a good year (well a good decade really!) for Spanish-language horror films (owing in no small measure, of course, to a certain Guillermo Del Toro, who settles for production duties here) was, in many ways, topped off with this, which received critical and box office success and can even be seen lurking in the chart section of our revered high street stores these days. Tags such as "this years Pan's Labyrinth" (weighty and far off the mark I'm afraid) have been flying around like witches above woods in Burkitsville. So, in this epic head-to-head between two Spanish-language horror films - this and the mighty (and slightly more recent) [REC] - who comes out on top?
Well, as avid perusers of the sight will have realise, REC has set a high benchmark for this to measure up to, scoring two A grades from two different MyFilmVault critics, a feat few films have achieved! Does El Orfanato - darling of the critics whereas REC has slipped a little more under the critical radar - measure up in terms of shocks and frights?
Unbelievably, for about 100 minutes of its 105 minute run time, it - almost - does. El Orfanato goes for the same, deeply disturbing, level of psychological terror attached to the supernatural that has served so many horror films so well, Halloween, The Blair Witch and, of course, REC, to name a few. Set in a truly creepy mansion that was once the orphanage of the title there are suitably enough creepy backstories of kids being abused, murdered and bullied to cause a more than a few hairs to stand on end from the forearms of this well ard 29 year old critic. One kid who appears in the scariest mask you've seen since Michael Myers visited the old joke shop in Haddonfield (it's a cross somewhere between the Scarecrow from Batman Begins and Jason in Friday the 13th Part Two - the best 'part', of course) is particularly terrifying, and I do mean terrifying, especially in one scene with heroine Laura, easily the film's standout moment.
Also like REC, the performances here were far better than those normally found in horror films and Belen Rueda puts in a perfectly anguished, tormented and guilt-ridden performance at the film's centre. Fernando Cayo is also okay as her cynical husband. In a way, the quality of the performances is reminiscent of another Spanish-language horror, Delo Toro's own this time, the excellent and superbly performed, Devil's Backbone.
Yet, you are left with the horrible feeling throughout that the ending is going to be shoddy, as so many horror films are. That is the difficult thing with horror films and why horror directors elicit more sympathy from me than others might - for a horror film to be truly effective, the fear must live with you, deep in your blood, long after the credits role and it is, genuinely, a very, very, difficult thing to do effectively. However, after a hundred or so minutes I was left eating my words and reaching for an A grade of some sort (probably a lower one as it happens). However, the next five minutes are mind-bendingly awful and a staggering disappointment to the extent that I felt genuinely cheated having invested a hundred minutes of my life in genuine terror only to be soundly let down by this abject failure of knowing how to end a film. It is a grotesque ending, completely unbefitting of the film and, equally, the bold 5 minutes that precede it. Why didn't they just leave at the moment they should have left it (those who have seen it will know what I'm talking about)? Absolutely teeth-gratingly annoying. Like getting a ticket to watch the England football team and finding out you've just paid £50 to watch Beckham and Lampard sleep their way through the latest game when you'd been assured they would be left on the bench. That, I think, is a very apt analogy.
This plummeted from (probably) A- to B- in a shocking (in the wrong sense) 5 minute spell. The moral of the story? If you're going to make a horror film, be brave enough to end it like a horror film, otherwise don't bother with the shocks and do what you want to do. Either way, you'll have a more effective whole and not this ramshackle effort that's trying to be all things to all men, women and ghosts.
B-
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