| The Orphanage
The Orphanage (or El Orfanato, to give it the pre-translation title), is a Spanish horror film from Juan Antonio Bayona (and produced by Guillermo del Toro, to give the audience a name they might recognise). It stars Belén Rueda as Laura, a woman who grew up in the orphanage of the title, and moves back there with her husband in later life to open it up as a home for disabled children.
Her son comes with her, and he has a couple of imaginary friends. Once he gets there, he picks up a few more imaginary friends. But just how imaginary are they?
That's all the plot I’m giving you, anyone who's seen more than one horror movie in their life can probably work out where it's going.
This film is not revolutionary, it’s not going to usher in a new generation of film-making innovation, and it’s not going to do very well at the box office (mostly because it's subtitled, and far too many slack-jawed mouth-breathing morons run a mile at the first sign of that).
What this film does have going for it is that it’s superbly well executed. The atmosphere is genuinely creepy in places, the performances are first-rate, the plot lacks the planet-sized holes that many horrors contain, and it works on levels beyond the purely scary, with a subtext about the relationship between parent and child that never feels forced or shoehorned in.
Put bluntly, this is a textbook example of a movie doing what so many fail to do, and getting the basics right. It shows that you don't have to be different to succeed, that excellence is a perfect substitute for innovation.
There’s a Hollywood remake of this in production, but I implore you all to do yourselves a favour and see this version, because much like Dark Water (a film this work has clearly been influenced by - to say how would be to spoil it), you just know the Americans will fuck it up. | 
