Review: The Orphanage

Warning! The following may contain spoilers…

“The Orphanage” is very much a traditional ghost story with traditional elements of the genre: A large, gloomy house with plenty of nooks, crannies, creaks and groans; a narrative structure founded on a mystery to be solved, namely, discovering the violent, traumatic event underlying the ghostly activity; a child sensitive to the presence of ghosts; and others. It is actually in some of these other elements that the film’s function as a ghost story critically compromises itself.

Cinema has developed a very specific vocabulary for post-apocalyptic stories: Deserted streets, decrepit technologies, nature’s return to power, ruined landmarks. Although Richard Matheson’s novel “I Am Legend” was first published in 1954, this third adaptation of the story, after “The Last Man On Earth” and “The Omega Man,” makes excellent use of the imagery offered by films released after the novel. There’s a bit of “12 Monkeys” in Francis Lawrence’s vision of a world depopulated by a virus, and “28 Days Later,” and “The Quiet Earth,” and many others. But for all the tried and true vocabulary, Lawrence succeeds in overcoming the familiarity to deliver something unsettling and melancholy. When the last remaining human on earth, military virologist Dr. Robert Neville (Smith), scavenges lifeless homes for survival resources, we get a glimpse of interrupted lives —

Like a “Little Miss Sunshine,” this indie-spirited film has the distinction of both living up to the buzz and delivering a few surprises. To go down the laundry list of the film’s strengths: Performances? Check. The cast plays the right tune and Ellen Page, far better served by the script than she was in her role as Kitty Pryde in “X-Men: The Last Stand,” is a knockout. Direction? Check. Jason Reitman, who brought us the hilarious and sharp satire “Thank You for Smoking,” gets a “Napoleon Dynamite” kind of vibe. Or “Little Miss Sunshine.” Or any low-key character study that’s perfectly happy sticking with an un-flashy, naturalistic filming style to let the focus remaining on the actors, story and dialogue.

Now here’s a wonderfully weird chimera, a film of many parts; part music video, part homage to spaghetti westerns (and part pastiche), part delirium, part cult film.

The film came with a buzz so thick and praise so effusive that when my own reaction to the Coen Brothers’ latest film clearly cast me in the role of contrarian, I had to break my cardinal rule and read other critics’ reviews before writing my own. Result: I remain a contrarian, and am sticking to my impression of the film as a work more horrific for its pretentiousness than its bourgeois nihilism.