Child's Play

While the eponymous Pan's Labyrinth keeps a child's fantasy in its own realm, Guillermo del Toro's latest offering - The Orphanage - is a Shyamalanesque take on the supernatural. Interwoven with many traditional elements of the horror flick (isolated house, seances, dark corridors, unfamiliar attics) is a very human tale of a mother-son relationship gone horribly wrong. The former movie does not cross the line into the supernatural - the latter does. The tragedy of the mother, wrought with a burden that she will never be free of, unless she dies and joins her son, is agony that quickly washes away the horror flick motifs and leaves the viewer with sadness in no little measure. Guillermo del Toro has through two movies carved out a genre for himself - this is not the fairytale of Hogwarts or Narnia, nor the brooding urbanity of The Sixth Sense or The Happening - this is of our childhood morals transcending our adult skepticism