The Orphanage

Grade: B-

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona makes his feature debut with this creepy but maddeningly convoluted entry in the haunted house genre. The elegant and intense Belen Rueda plays an adoptive mother who purchases the orphanage in which she grew up, only to lose her HIV-infected son to a kidnapper...or meddlesome ghosts...or could it be something even more sinister? Rather than pay brief and clever tributes to classic ghost movies, Bayona borrows heavily and clumsily from films like Poltergeist and The Others. And sometimes he provides so little background info that the scary bits (such as the masked freakazoid pictured above) seem random and yield minimal adrenaline jolts.