The scene: A knock, knock game
If you were watching director J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and wondering why, in the second half, this big-budget dinosaur adventure movie suddenly morphed into a haunted-mansion movie of sorts… well, Bayona’s debut feature, The Orphanage (La Orfanato), will explain a few things. Because, frankly, when you have a filmmaker who’s simply this good at making a scary-house movie, you just let him do his thing. Like The Haunting, The Others, and other classics of the genre, The Orphanage has so much more on its mind than sending tingles up your spine; it’s steeped in grief and history and – led by a terrific Belén Rueda as the mother who moves her family back to her childhood home, a former orphanage for children with disabilities – deeply moving. And, yes, it’s also scary as hell. Perhaps no more so than in the scene where Rueda’s Laura begins to commune with the child ghosts of former residents through the children’s game of “knock, knock”: knock twice, count to three, and turn around to see who’s behind you. With each turn, she sees the specters slowly advancing, until…
