El Orfanato: The Orphanarium

We decided to take a break from the award-bait movies today and went instead to see Guillermo Del Toro Presents some other spanish dude's movie El Orfanato.

This is what you call a crap-shoot. Famous directors put their names on others' films I think because they genuinely feel they have merit, or something worth cultivating. Very often whatever that is ain't there yet. Horror movies may be the worst, and sometimes the directors may have less pure motives than cultivating talent.

The Orphanage was, in the end, pretty good. I mean that literally, too: The ending is solid, nicely spooky and a not disappointing payoff for the build-up. The beginning is too slow and while the shocks that there are are quite good, there aren't really enough of them.

This is more suspense than horror. In the end, you could argue convincingly that nothing supernatural happened at all, though that's sort of a bleak way to look at things.

If you don't mind a slow build-up, it's good for a watch.