When you send you kids to an orphanage do you ever think that there might have been a previous orphanage there or that the ghosts of maltreated children occupied the home? The spookiness of the orphanage was something I went along with because the film revolves around a missing boy and his make believe friends who were from the previous generation.
Somehow two generations got tangled in the film as the little boy was presumed to have invisible friends who were actually the ghosts of children that had died when his mother was a child. That was when the boy's mother was a girl at an orphanage. Her need to find her child by connecting with his ghostly friends was the driving force of the film and the audience understood they meant no harm.
One can admire the gradual increase in the tension of the story and the twists it takes along the way. The mother, Laura, is convinced the only way to find her son is to find physical clues that would take her to what her son called as the little house of his friend. All this is after a heightened moment in the film where a medium is called to investigate the presence of spirits in the home.
She even played a tag game that she played when she was little. Because of the spookiness of the film and the dark moments when Laura wakes up to loud noises that invade the home, one is not quite sure about the intentions of the young spirits still inhabiting the house.
At first one witnessed an older woman who came apparently to get the boy out of the orphanage while posing as a social worker. The boy has Aids, but we soon learn that many years earlier, the old lady was an older person when the mother was there. The old lady turns out to be a former orphan who was looking for the body of her son called Thomas but somehow one had a sense that she would have settled for any child. Laura did not know who the woman was until she contacted authorities and even had a psychologist study the missing case. It was strange that the old lady was pushing a baby carriage down a street with an effigy of her son in it.
The subplot of the discontented husband moves on with the increased tension that occurs when the boy is found missing at a party. Questions arise as to who was the sack covered kid that appeared out of the past at the same time to haunt the scene and raise questions to a portal between past and present for Laura. She knew the sack-covered head occurred in child drawings around the around and appeared metaphorically at the beginning as a scarecrow and then again as a stuffed doll that the strange lady wheeled in her baby carriage in memory of her missing boy. The movie is then rich with allegory as it is with imagination.
I admired the transition from one world to the next as Laura turns around with the supposed remains of her son, as she is about to enter the forgotten world of the orphanage many years earlier. Eventually the son materializes, Laura sees herself as a little girl and one recollects that as a sign of the transition between the past and present.
The husband who left the haunted home returns to find that Laura has joined her son in the past as an adult so that she could also tend to needs of the other children that were kept prisoners. I would overlook a few glitches in the filming like the finding of an almost complete child's body, six months after his disappearance, to see this.
