The Orphanage

Laura returns to the seaside orphanage where she grew up, intending to reopen it as a home for disabled children. Her adopted son starts describing new friends, and then goes missing.

Juan Antonio Bayona directs the scares with real precision. The game of one-two-three-knock-on-the-wall is the standout, and the sequence with the medium in the house, filmed on infrared cameras from a monitoring room, is the best use of that device anywhere.

Belén Rueda carries it entirely, and the performance is about a woman refusing to accept a conclusion that everybody else reached weeks ago.

The ending divides people. It is either unbearably sad or a cop-out, and which one depends on whether you read the last twenty minutes literally.

The lighthouse, the cave and the sack are the images that stay.