The Orphanage (El Orfanato, 2007): Laura returns to the orphanage where she grew up to reopen it as a home for disabled children. However, her son starts talking to “invisible friends,” and soon after, he vanishes, forcing Laura to confront the tragic history of the house.
Thoughts
The Others and The Sixth Sense are rare Westen’s Supernatural gems because of how they present internal horror. The Orphanage joins that list for me, although not on the same level as the two legends. It isn’t about fighting a monster; it’s about a mother’s grief and the ghosts of the past that we refuse to let go of.
However, there is a plot hole that nags at me, and I am quite petty about this stuff:
We find out that Benigna (Tomás’ mother) worked at the orphanage, then poisons the five children who caused the death of her son and… silence?
Five children went missing, yet no one talked about it.
I remember the conversation where they said “nothing can be done to the kids since they were playing” regarding Tomás’ accident, which explains why the law didn’t punish the kids. But no explanation about what happened to the kids afterwards. Five kids vanished? Any explanation?
If I have to make a guess, it had to do with the historical context in 1970s Spain, likely with messy records and a chaotic transfer process. Or it’s plausible that Benigna or the Headmistress falsified the paperwork to say the kids were “transferred” or “ran away” — the latter to avoid being accused of incompetence.
But it’s too speculative. I am okay with filling in the blanks as long as there is something to convince me it is grounded. But the movie never explicitly mentions this. It asks us to “just figure it out with your imagination.”
I understand the need to keep the fate of the kids a secret for the sake of the plot twist. But a simple conversation after the bodies were found, explaining why no one looked for them back then, would have closed that loop. I would appreciate a cop or a local saying just a simple one-liner: “Oh, these were kids reported running away in the 70s!”
It’s a beautiful, tragic ghost story, I’m just annoyed that instead of interpreting the story with my own thoughts, I have to fill in the blanks for something seemingly deemed unimportant by the people behind the scenes.