Dangerous Games.('The Orphanage')(Movie review)

The New Year begins in fear and trembling. That, at least, will be the salutary experience of anyone who sees "The Orphanage," the first film from the young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. He devotes himself to his small, shuddering tale with that blend of gusto and particularity--the near-pedantic wish to make the details lock and hold--which by tradition marks out the debutant. Indeed, "The Orphanage" is unblushingly traditional, one rule of horror movies being that there is nothing new under the moon. Rather than clutching at originality, Bayona, like any wise practitioner of the genre, seems happy to raise the dead--to bring fresh life to old tropes and buried images. If he chooses to film his main location, the orphanage of the title, from somewhere around rosebush level, craning upward to catch it at a looming angle, and so to conjure memories of the Bates house in "Psycho," well, good for him.

The orphanage, which lies within running distance of the sea, is in fact an ex-orphanage, bought by Laura (Belen Rueda) and her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo). Their plan is to restore it to its former glory, providing a haven for disabled children--and a home for their own son, Simon (Roger Princep), who does not know that he is both adopted and H.I.V.-positive. The unsettling thing is that Laura was raised in this same orphanage, before it closed down; at the start of the film, we see her as a child in its gardens, under a rain of thistledown, deep in a game of Grandmother's footsteps. Why she should want to embark on such a project--whether she has exorcistic urges or is merely repaying a debt--is never clarified, and, as for the question of whether she would be judged fit to run an orphanage, it is barely raised. A scary movie, however, is meant to be infested with implausibilities, and what counts is whether we allow them to nip and needle us throughout or whether, as happens here, we learn to live with them, and even, perhaps, to relish their powers of suggestion. Is it the case, for instance, that Laura could not wait to revisit her old haunts, or could it be that, like the planet to which Ripley returns in "Aliens," the place was waiting for her?

The house in Bayona's film certainly makes all the right noises: creaks, moans, unheralded door slams--the full panoply of orchestrated dread. But who are the ghosts, if any, and what is their complaint? Simon, like most fanciful children, claims the companionship of invisible friends, and those absent figures grow every bit as present, and as pressing, as any of the living characters. Sometimes this is achieved through pure composition; down at the seashore, the boy is seen inside a cave, talking casually to someone just out of sight, obscured by a jutting wall of rock. His mother finds nobody there when she looks, of course, though she does find footmarks in the sand. This imprint of the spectral leads to a superb sequence at a children's party, back at the orphanage, where the young guests wear masks. One of them, approached by Laura, turns nasty on her, blood is spilled, and the action quickens into panic. Simon gets lost, his parents race down to the beach once more, and the camerawork, hitherto as calm as a pool, is reduced to handheld jolts.

You may be surprised to find "The Orphanage" becoming a missing-persons investigation, until you realize that what concerns Bayona is not a police procedural--the cops hardly intrude on the movie, and one thoughtful sniffer dog could have cracked the plot before it began--but a meditation on what it means to go astray. Simon is missing, presumed dead, although his mother fiercely believes otherwise, whereas someone like Tomas--his closest imaginary friend--is missing from view but presumed in some mysterious way to be alive. Moreover, the missing need not be the sponsors of terror; many children's games, for example, depend on the secretive pleasure of vanishing, and "The Orphanage" is constructed like a long, intricate session of hide-and-seek, littered with tactile clues--a doorknob, a rag doll, an ice-cream wrapper, and a trail of seashells, like the pebbles and scraps of bread that Hansel and Gretel, already fearing their own disappearance, cunningly left in their wake.

Once Simon has been gone for half a year, and common sense proposes that he will not be seen again, his mother turns, more in determination than in despair, to those who are gifted with a sense of the uncommon. A team of paranormal inquirers comes to the orphanage, led by a figure clad in black, as slender as a child's stick drawing, and as recognizable, even from ...