The Orphanage: Film review

The Orphanage, 2007, is a Spanish drama, mystery and horror film produced by director, Guillermo Del Toro. Often related to “The Others” and “Pans Labyrinth”, The Orphanage is known as a psychological thriller when introducing the main focus of “imaginary friends” and the fearful idea of evil children. Targeted towards 15+, The Orphanage includes no gore, just bone trembling tension as the spirit world of the orphanage begin to play little games on the new family moving in, introducing a melodramatic, family detective genre. 

When depicting the film, the plot follows the lines of a young couple moving into a new home, an old orphanage that the female once lived in as a child. Hoping to create a home for handicapped children, Laura, (Belen Rueda), and Carlos, (Fernando Cayo), adopt a son who soon catches their attention when seen talking to some imaginary friends and following hunts that have been organised for him to enable secretive information to be fed into Simon that he was unaware of beforehand. “Simon”, (Roger Princep), is no ordinary child and after a party celebrated in the home, he goes missing and is only thought to have been captured by the spirits playing games with him.

 The Orphanage, like many other movies of its kind, has a simple narrative structure that has been identified as “Todorov’s theory”. Beginning with an equilibrium, otherwise known as a status quo, the opening of the film proves a certain balance in society. Before long, the disruption of equilibrium takes place by a certain action, producing a problem that needs to be solved. A recognition of the disruption is discovered and then an opportunity to repair the disruption is attempted before the equilibrium is once again stable. Todorov’s theory is proved in a lot of films as the basic structure. In The Orphanage, the beginning of the film, as already noted, portrays a normal family moving into a new home with the intentions of creating a home for handicapped children. 

As the son is seen talking to his imaginary friends, the normality of the plot alters and as the film continues, the supernatural themed story disrupts the equilibrium. As the son goes missing and the parents are aware of the circumstance, the parents go through medium activity to attempt to identify what the supernatural spirits living in their home want from the family. By doing this, the family are in an attempt to repair the disruption. After the mystery continues and the mother is becoming more and more agitated, the action continues to take place as the son is found dead in the cellar of the house. As an end of the story, the audience and characters within the story are aware that the mother’s disturbance was out of control and that she actually accidentally murdered her son in an attempt to help him. Due to the abrupt end to the plot, the mother destroys her own life. To confirm Todorov’s theory, we are able to establish that through the death of the mother and son, the father’s life continues through the slow paced equilibrium that the last scene brings as all of the chaos has disappeared, despite the loss of his closest. 

 Binary opposition is another narrative structure that was identified by a French anthropologist and ethnologist, “Claude Levi Strauss”. Believing that the words we understand depend not so much on the specific meaning but the understanding of the opposite words, for instance Villain and hero, Strauss came up with a structure for films. These particular binary opposition structures for horror films included good and evil, sane and insane, rational and irrational and supernatural and human. At the beginning, binary opposition was used as a simple term and was easy to identify when viewing a film. In recent years, films include binary oppositions such as vampires vs. werewolves in films such as “Twilight” that are harder to distinguish. At an early age, we as humans develop an understanding on these opposites. As a starting point, good vs. evil is one that all young children can identify visually through specific actions or provoked from the feelings that are stimulated through the actions. Strauss identified that in films, situations can be reducible to two possible states and has no possibilities in the middle. In The Orphanage, good vs. evil is not a structure that can be identified; however three other definite binary oppositions are apparent. The binary oppositions within The Orphanage help the audience to distinguish the genre of the film by the structures being used as a framework. Throughout the film, “Laura” is presented as the protagonist character, whilst the spectator follows the point of view of her character, shown in all three binary oppositions. Despite there being one main protagonist, the antagonist alters between the different characters as the film plot develops. At the beginning of the film, the equilibrium of the scene also presents the rational humans as oppose to the supernatural spirits. As Simon is shown talking to his imaginary friends, Laura and Carlos behave like rational parents and assume that Simon is behaving the way he is due to having no siblings. 


However, when Simon disappears, the alienation between rational thoughts and supernatural power is hard to distinguish. As the story develops, the second binary opposition of Laura turning somewhat into an “investigator” from her normal motherly character is apparent whilst the question of “What actually happened in the past?” is brought up to the spectators attention. In the last few scenes of the film, the third binary opposition, Laura vs. Carlos, is distinguished through the argumentative characters. As the audience begin to take sides and feel certain disgust towards the father as he attempts to persuade the mother to leave the home and forget about Simon, the binary opposition suits the structure of protagonist vs. antagonist more as a film convention.

The last narrative structure that I will be focusing on is one by “Vladimir Propp”. Propp was a Russian soviet formalist scholar who discovered the basic character types in folk tales. Ranging from the villain, to the hero, all of the characters could be found within every film analysed. In the film, The Orphanage, I feel as if the characters are more so going against Propp’s theory than following the conventions due to the characters changing from the antagonist to protagonist as the film develops and only having the three main characters throughout the film with the supernatural characters in specific parts and the medium group in others. Whilst the supernatural children suit the “villain” stereotype due to being the subject that is most daunting and scary towards the audience, Laura and Carlos also become the villains by the thought of Laura going insane and becoming the character who seems to be causing most chaos. As the film develops, her disturbance goes out of control and by the accidental murder of her own son, she becomes the villain. As Carlos decides to get on with his own life and forget about the house, his son and their future, the spectator automatically looks at him as if he’s a bad person and judges his personal choice. After we are aware that the spirits only wanted love and care, we sympathise with the characters and no longer see them as villains. Laura ends her life in the hope that she can be with her son and the spirits once again, creating a heart melting scene and alters her character towards the hero character type by helping the spirit children who were lonely and in need of a mother. As a personal opinion, I wouldn’t class Simon as any of the normal character types that the protagonist character would be listed as by Propp as he wasn’t a hero, a villain or a donor, to name but a few. However, due to Simon’s ability to widen his parents imagination and to be the first to mention anything to do with the spirits, I feel as if he was the helper towards fulfilling the spirits needs. Lastly, the medium group best suited the donor character type due to them offering guidance and giving the hero, which would be Laura, a “magical object” for guidance. 

 As a conclusion, I feel as if the film chosen supports Tzvetan Todorov’s narrative structure theory and Claude Levi Strauss’ binary opposition theory, however not so much the last character type theory by Vladimir Propp. As my own opinion, I would also consider genre theories that support the horror film, The Orphanage, that includes horror conventions including spirits, old orphanage buildings, children with bags over their heads and sound that creates tension, fear and lots of jumping!