Pay no attention to the efforts of the people behind this film’s DVD box who plaster Guillermo del Toro‘s name prominently on the front. For this beautifully spooky Spanish fright flick, the Pan’s Labyrinth director merely plays producer.
Like Pan’s and The Devil’s Backbone, it centers on children and the horrors both real and ghostly they experience. Here a woman (Belen Rueda) who spent time in the title building as a child returns to it as an adult to open her own orphanage for handicapped children. Things start going eerie even before her own son disappears.
First-time feature director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio Sanchez thankfully spare us Pan’s unrelenting brutality and instead provide plenty of goose bump scares and moments that will merely unsettle you. Things go bump in the night. A mysterious little kid wears a sack with two eye holes on his head. A character finds bones among ashes. You know. Good old ghost story stuff.
So check it out if you liked The Others and The Sixth Sense, or even the more recent The Invisible. The blood-and-guts people can go drool over Hostel, Part II.
Drama/Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Rated R
Release Date: 04/22/08