Fair warning: this is a well-made, hair-raising, emotionally intense, look-over-your-shoulder ghost story.
Laura (Belén Rueda) and her doctor husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) bring their young adopted son Simón (Roger Príncep) to live in the house where Laura grew up, the orphanage of the title, an antique mansion in Llanes, Asturias, on Spain’s Atlantic Coast.
They bought the house with the intention to open a home for a small number of special needs children in addition to their HIV-positive son. Soon after they arrive, Simón claims that he has a number of invisible children as friends.
Strange activities seem to occur in the house, such as an old woman hiding in a utility shed with a garden spade, though many of these occurrences at the same time seem to have simple, rational explanations. Then Simón disappears without a trace during an open house Laura and Carlos give for prospective patients and their parents.
Pipes bangs and floorboards creak, old outdoor playground equipment squeaks as it blows in the brisk coastal wind. Small items get moved around. Laura, convinced that Simón is alive, dedicates herself to find him and to get to the bottom of the dark secret that plagues the house. She and Carlos even employ a Jung-inspired team of paranormal researchers, which includes a psychic named Aurora, played by Geraldine Chaplin.
When these steps fail, Laura turns to cryptic clues that Simón intimated in play with her before he disappeared, as well as memories from her own childhood in the orphanage, to get to the bottom of the mystery.
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