Real-life fears of defeat shown in El Orfanato- and everything I loved about it
Contains SPOILERS for El Orfanato (2008).
The things that are truly the most horrific to us are what explores the things closest to our reality-
Psychological horrors like El Orfanato (2008) love to dive into the idea of motherhood and the worst possible scenarios that come with it.
Amongst all of the creepy masks, eerie basements, and even mutilated corpses coming back to life, I’d say the most terrifying concept this film explores is the thought of failing your child. Fighting tooth and nail to make sure that your loved ones make it out of a dire situation, scouring the area and reaching out for help wherever you could, just to find out they’ve been dead in a hidden basement the entire time, and despite your efforts throughout their lifetime there was nothing you could do about their downfall- surely that’s somebody’s worst nightmare.
With that being said, suppressed illness and family secrets come into play as something that can make or break one’s wellbeing. Illnesses especially present in children characters are an indicator of how well the society or family portrayed is doing at caretaking, or just in general.
When it comes to this family, on the surface they are perfect: In the beginning of the film we see Laura, her husband Carlos, and their son Simón living a dream life as a happy family.
Only shortly after do we begin to unpack Pandora’s Box, revealing secrets about Simón that drive him into anger and questioning- he’s adopted, and has AIDs.
And of course he actually finds this out the hard way (I’ll note that the reveal was built up through one of the coolest ‘treasure hunt’ scenes ever). He does not handle it well, insulting Laura and shouting at her that she’s not his mother. We’re reaching the point where it’s clear that these parents do not have it as well-kept together as they had hoped, and their mistakes are coming back to haunt them (whether it be with ghosts or not). Keeping this vital information bottled up for so long led to an explosive chain of consequences.
Even when everything falls apart, Laura persists and is obsessively fixated on putting it all back together.
When it comes to portrayal of matriarchal figures, something I strongly appreciate with this film is a trait shared with some of my previous entries, Train to Busan (2016), and can additionally even be said for Halloween (1978): This time, the matriarchal figure is not defeated and depicted as useless because of her caring traits.
There’s a number of films where this matriarchal and feminine care is depicted as a weakness. While it can be a weakening factor here for Laura, as her care and obsession for finding her missing son drives her to mental turmoil, it’s more of a driving factor than a defeat, and a source of determination for her to face whatever perils she may come across. This motivates her to drive the threat towards her, and gives her the willingness to fight it head-on.
The defeat that comes with her determination is only the moment she finds out it was all in vain, finding that during the entirety of those (approximate) 9 months of searching and hoping endlessly, Simón was dead underneath their noses.
Of course, Laura, our main character, is gaslit left and right and consistently fighting doubt. At many points the audience isn’t even entirely sure what’s real or not — a classic defining factor of Psychological Horror.
Even so, this is not what I’d consider a “traditional” Horror film, especially from the Western Horror that I’ve become more familiar with. Jump scares were limited, and what made the film scary was an ongoing development of dread (another defining factor of Psych. horror that makes me more fond of this subgenre). In this film was also a nice mix of fantastical-adventure bits, and how these bits and other themes came full circle to play a significant part in the storytelling; El Orfanato is is taken as a dark retelling of Peter Pan, and even has mentions of Peter Pan featured in the story- a fantasy-adventure touch here does even more to effectively depict that theme. Overall it came out with the perfect balance between horrific dread and a hopeful adventure.
The ending reminded me of Dark Water (2005), where the mother abandoned the living to look after the dead. But what makes this better than Dark Water in my opinion is that Laura follows the dead not to leave her child behind, but to find her way back to him. Plus some others to look after.
She doesn’t live her dream to take care of kids in real life but does get to do so in the universe of the children that suffered in the past. Even if she dies, she does get her happy ending.
