For an old-fashioned, but not old-styled, gothic ghost story, El Orfanato is a stunner: technically brilliant, inventive when it needs to be, and delivering cattle-prod-like jolts of fright throughout.  Indeed, as a nearly flawless "old dark house" flick, Juan Antonio Bayona's much-acclaimed film goes a long way toward revitalizing the entire subgenre.  But let's be clear about one thing from the outset.  Despite its Guillermo del Toro-exec-produced pedigree, The Orphanage does not re-imagine or blend genres as his films do, notably last year's Pan's Labyrinth.  In fact, that's what's most impressive about screenwriter Sergio Sanchez's work here—he's doing the "so-old-it's-new strategy" and—guess what?—the result is as refreshing as he no doubt intended.  Still, the sheer density of overly familiar horror tropes will strike some as bit much.  Here's a partial catalog:

• "imaginary" playmates à la The Shining (1980)
• a disfigured little boy picked on by his peers
• creepy antique dolls with bugged-out eyes
• authority figures skeptical of the paranormal
• freaky kid artwork done in a faux primitive style
• the "sensitive" Zelda-Rubinsteinesque wise woman archetype
• and the tight-lipped, spinsterish and repressed old woman archetype

All of this, not to mention creaking doors and things that literally go bump in the night, and you've got a regressive pleasure chest full of resonant scares.  Bayona presents these ingredients as if his film is the first to feature them, and he pretty much pulls it off.  That's because he and cinematographer Óscar Faura deliver this grab bag with such assuredness and panache that they make you recall why such horror staples are so unnerving—and such great fun—in the first place.  It's the kind of movie an adult can see, even a jaded horror fan, and re-experience what it's like to be a fourth-grader fearful of the darkness in the theater itself.

Without question, though, The Orphanage is bound to leave some hardcore horror fans shaking their heads and wondering what all the fuss in Toronto, Cannes, and New York was about.  That is, it's the kind of effort that will leave more than a few folks in a cynical frame of mind, terming it a horror film aimed squarely at mainstream audiences.  If you think you might fit into this category of skeptics, I'll provide a couple of comparative touchstones so that you'll know whether The Orphanage is for you:  the film combines the masterful atmospherics of The Others (2001) with the poignant, and contemporary, themes of Hideo Nakata's original Dark Water (2002).

  Sound good?  Then stop reading and go.  Also, horror hipsters should know that The Orphanage, despite its traditionalism, is hardly melodramatic or corny.  After all, you gotta love a movie that undermines its one heartwarming monologue with creeping dread.

As the lead, Belén Rueda, who made an impression on me as Javier Bardem's lawyer in The Sea Inside (2004), is haunted-looking even before the hauntings proper begin.  The heavy lines under her eyes, her even heavier sighs, paint a portrait of a Madonna just biding her time until her pietà.  As an almost Almodovarian protagonist—both iconoclastic and relentlessly feminine—her character truly is the "madre fuerte" that she's called at one point.  The English subtitle had this as "good mother" rather than "strong/tough mother," perhaps due to some idiom of which I'm unaware, but make no mistake, she's more forceful than nice.  The rest of the characters, including her husband played by Fernando Cayo, are rather disappointingly two-dimensional in comparison.

But you probably won't care much because the second lead is the "title character," the orphanage itself, and it gives a marvelous performance.  Indeed, Bayona and Faura manage to make all of the film's formidable spaces—caves, beaches, hidden rooms—both metaphorical and real.  Using tilts to draw attention to verticality with a frequency that's rare in horror films, they create a Jungian sense of architecture, in which the sets reflect internal states and psychic hierarchies.  Sánchez's brainy script even quotes Jung at one point on the coexistence of the living and the dead in the subconscious.  Similarly, in an almost blatantly self-referential moment, we learn how a spiritual medium (Geraldine Chaplin in a memorable turn) attempts to blend past, present, and future and thereby create a form of "time travel."

Yet despite such cerebral flights of fancy, this is a popcorn movie—or rather, a spill-the-popcorn movie—of the highest order.  Mystery, suspense and horror are three very different things but The Orphanage weaves them together effortlessly.  Add an evocative soundscape and editing designed to produce maximum discomfort, and you've got a state-of-the-art horror film.  If further validation of this point is necessary, one need only look to how the creepy opening, involving a children's game, is perfectly echoed in a virtuoso scene late in the movie; it only lasts about a minute on the screen, but it's sure to be talked about, and appear in documentaries on the genre, for years to come.  In fact, the entire production is so transportive that by the time the houselights come back on you might find yourself asking, like the young boy at the drama's center, "Can I wake up now?"