A terrible beauty

El orfanato (The orphanage)

Crit

Guillermo del Toro "presents" this film, which owes a debt to his 2001 El espinazo del Diablo (The devil's backbone) as well as to perhaps every spooky-lost-child film ever--Poltergeist comes to mind, especially for the eccentric psychic brought in to shed light on the case (this one played with placid grace by Geraldine Chaplin), as does The Shining. But this is no pastiche: Juan Antonio Bayona has crafted an original, literally chilling film that is less about shocking you out of your seat (though it did achieve that once) than about burrowing under your skin. It kept me off-balance until the climactic scene without ever betraying its own logic. And, oh, my, that penultimate, perfect scene: I was near tears with sadness and joy. If there's space between this and greatness, I lack the critical discernment to see it. Speaking of seeing, below is an invisible paragraph that should should leave alone if you haven't seen the film, as it contains a neutron bomb of a spoiler. But come back after you've seen the film and drag your cursor over the white text.

As I walked home from the theater, I met an elderly, toothless street person, and as we passed, she barked, not to me but to the uncaring universe, "Better off dead!" After cycling quickly through the humanist and the cynical reactions, I suddenly realize that I'd just heard the perfect description of Laura's state at the end of the film.