Movie Review: The Orphanage

The Orphanage is about a woman who is an orphan in…an orphanage. Right. And then she gets adopted and grows up and adopts a son of her own. And then she buys the shitty orphanage she grew up in and opens it up as a special needs orphanage. And then crazy ghosts come and kidnap her son, and the ending is horribly depressing, and I was so sad I couldn’t even cry. The end.

Ok, ok, I’ll back up. This is a movie produced by Guillermo Del Toro, and after Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, I should have accepted that this was going to be a depressing piece of work. I had no idea that it was going to be so bone-crushingly awful, though. It was marketed as a horror movie, but instead sapped me of my will to live. If I hadn’t immediately disassociated myself from my feelings when I realized exactly what was happening at the end, I probably would have stepped out in front of a car afterwards.

The main thing that pissed me off was that I saw through part of what was going on right from the start. The ghosts play a trick on the son and the son shows the mom how to play the game. I knew, right from there, that as soon as the son disappeared and the mom found her first clue, that she was supposed to play the game with them. I was practically yelling at the screen, and by the time she figured out what was going on, I had given up on any hope of her actually unraveling the mystery.

You know, I’m almost too disappointed in the movie to finish the review. The story was choppy, parts of it were totally unnecessary, it didn’t connect with other parts, and the advertising for it was misleading (which works sometimes for me, but most of the time, no way). I was glad they ended it the way that they did, because with Pan’s Labyrinth, they left it open to interpretation, and there is NO WAY I was going to stand for it if they left this one up to interpretation and I had to listen to people say how the two movies ended so happily because SERIOUSLY PEOPLE, that is TOTAL CRAP and it’s delusional to think there is ANYTHING happy about these endings.

Ok, enough of this, thinking about the movie is making me want to eat thumbtacks. Four thumbs down on this one, including my toes. Well, maybe not four, but at least one.