The Orphanage Freaked Me Out

I feel like all I've been doing is watching scary movies and then reporting them back to you, my wonderful M.B. readers...rest assured, I won't make this site solely about movies...but in June, Halloween related paraphanalia is few and far-between. so stick with me, I promise that by mid-August we will be in full gear because that is when I do the bulk of my M.B. shopping and decor and costume design.

With that said, I'm going to tell you about a movie I saw on Monday night- The Orphanage, or El Orfanato (that's Spanish)

This movie was so suspenseful, that I didn't even care that I had to read the words (a.k.a subtitles).

Basically, the movie is about this woman (Laura) who is raised at the Good Shepard Orphanage. At 7, she is adopted and leaves the home. As an adult, Laura, her husband Carlos, and their son, Simon (there's an accent on the i, but i don't have that capacity here at blogspot to show you that, pretend with me ok?)

move back to the orphanage with plans to reopen it as a home for disabled and sick children. Soon after their arrival there, this creepy woman named Benigna, who claims to be a social worker, visits them and reveals that she knows about Laura's past, as well as that Simon is adopted (shock!) and that he is HIV Positive (double shock!). Laura kicks Benigna out of the house, and later that night, she finds Benigna with a shovel in the shed being creepy as usual. Laura chases Benigna out of her shed and she runs away.

During the next few days, Laura takes Simon to the beach and Simon, who already has imaginary friends, meets a new friend, Tomas (once again, accent the A). Simon leaves trail of shells to his house to show the friend where to follow him. Laura originally pays this no mind, but then one morning awakens to find a ton of seashells at her doorstep. DUN DUN DUNNNN.

Anyway, Laura and Carlos host an open house type of thing to invite the disabled children and their families to check the home out. Simon and Laura get into a fight and Simon disappears. Laura then begins looking for Simon, and we run into this character:

who is seriously the creepiest thing on planet Earth. He ends up pushing Laura into the bathtub and she injures herself...once again, look at this kid/thing:

AHHH!!

Anyway, Laura gets pried out of the bathroom by Carlos and then becomes frantic. She thinks she sees Simon in this cave on the beach that they had gone to the other day, but the tide becomes too high and she can't get to him.

We later find out that nobody was in that cave.

Months go by and we find that Simon is still missing. Laura wakes up often and hears noises in the house. Carlos and Laura are in contact with a psychologist named Pilar, who reveals that the social worker Benigna isn't even a social worker. It turns out that she worked at the orphanage when Laura was there and had a deformed son named Tomas (we see a picture of the same boy with the same mask that pushed Laura into the tub earlier and we are immediately creeped out). It turns out that the children, in toying with Tomas, ended up killing him by having him go into the cave on the beach and the tide drowned him.

Laura and Carlos end up driving somewhere, I think to a bereavement group, and see Benigna crossing the street. Laura immediately jumps up and yells her name, she turns around...and BAM! she gets hit by a passing ambulance. It's outrageous how terrifying this scene is, Jim jumped.

They try to revive her but she dies...only after jumping up and grabbing Laura:

Laura, distraught, feels like the orphanage is haunted. She finds this speaker, who puts her in contact with a medium, and they investigate her house. They find that the house is haunted, and the medium tells Laura that believing is seeing.

Carlos wants to leave the house, but Laura feels there is unfinished business and that she needs to find what happened to Simon before she can leave. She and Simon, before his disappearance had played a "Game" that Simon had said that his imaginary friends had created. Laura begins to recreate the orphanage as it had used to be, and decides to play in the game to try to find Simon.

In the end, she ends up finding out where Simon was....it turns out he had fallen into the hidden room where Tomas was kept, and died. The noises that Laura had heard were in fact Simon falling to his death. Laura is so distraught that she takes Simon's pills and overdoses and dies. She ends up remaining in the orphanage in the afterlife, taking care of the children ghosts, Tomas, and Simon forever.

It was the creepiest and saddest movie ever. There were no special effects and it was quite possibly the most suspenseful movies I've ever seen.

The producer of the film, Guillermo del Toro was also responsible for the movie Pans Labyrinth, which was also an amazing movie.


Don't believe me? Here's the official trailer: