Spanish ghost story that strives at all times to stay within arm’s reach of ambiguity — real ghosts or overheated imagination? — in the mold of the Henry James prototype, The Turn of the Screw, or at any rate in the mold of the academic squabbles over it. James may have set out to write a straightforward ghost story, but was, bless his unsullied soul, incapable of it. Director J.A. Bayona is no James, nor is he even a Jack Clayton, the judicious filmmaker who turned The Turn… into The Innocents on screen. The basic situation without doubt seems primed for “resonance,” and the lead actress, Belén Rueda, seems primed almost for spontaneous combustion. An adopted orphan returns to the palatial orphanage thirty years later, with plans to reopen it, and with an adopted, HIV-positive orphan of her own. The boy, already inclined towards imaginary playmates, appears to have made contact with the ghosts of half a dozen children still hanging about the place, and soon goes missing. His mother then goes bananas. Bayona’s tightwire act of trying to walk a line of psychological subtlety while also trying to keep genre addicts on the hook tends to make the obligatory jolts feel all the more forced and factitious: the premonitory music, the startling noises, the creaking hinges, the magnified eyes of the prune-faced old lady behind her coke-bottle lenses, the fingers slammed in the bathroom door and the backward jackknife into the tub, the plowed-over pedestrian and the gruesome makeup on the carcass. Through all that, we are apt to remain, in common with the rational husband and policewoman, unconvinced and unmoved. Ambiguity will have that effect. The climax, when the heroine is at last left alone in the house, nevertheless crams in two or three good shivers, but it goes on three or four steps too far. Fernando Cayo, Roger Princep, Geraldine Chaplin. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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