I just watched the movie two days ago. It is a disturbing movie with so much potential to go towards either a psychological or a supernatural direction. However, the direction and scripting were too mediocre to be able to achieve a satisfactory level.
STORY The story is set in the late 1950's at an orphanage in the French Alps. The plot revolves around Anna who is pregnant because she was gang-raped by her employees, or so it seemed. There is a scene where she had a nightmare, whereby for a couple of seconds, we see her being rendered unconscious in the company of 6-8 naked men.
This incident traumatised her and she can't accept her condition. In fact throughout the movie Anna shows her disgust towards her baby and even attempts to abort it in one scene. Ironically, she seems to be intrigued by the orphanage history of some dead children. The story progresses as we see Anna trying to decipher the mystery of these 'scary children', apparitions of child-ghosts that roam the old orphanage.
Through her ordeal, Anna befriends a mentally unstable girl by the name of Judith, who we later find out was one of the surviving 300 World War II orphans that were brought to St. Ange in 1946. Apparently these children were brought to the orphanage under dire conditions, and since there were only two 'lousy' doctors available, many of them didn't survive.
Again through Anna's mischievous curiosity, she and Judith manage to find a secret passage through the communal children bathroom into an abandoned children wing of the orphanage. Within this wing there is an elevator that goes several stories underground. Anna takes the elevator and comes out in an alternate dimension, whereby she arrives in a clean pseudo-experimental hospital. What she finds there is surreal, scary and disturbing.
It is likely that the orphanage is sitting on top of a Nazi experimental laboratory, where they performed experiments on Jewish children. Anna later gives birth to her stillborn baby with the help of the scary children. They both die in the process and become ghosts themselves.
WHAT I THINK There were a few goose-bumps throughout the middle section of the movie, but they failed to lift up my interest as it seemed the director didn't know which way to take the movie. And it certainly didn't help when the bulk of the running time was spent filming trivial scenes of Anna, where it was tempting to say that the director was more enamored with Virginie Ledoyen the actress, than progressing the story along a definite narration.
I think there was so much potential to the movie. Potentials for genuinely scary moments that could've been shot in the children communal bathroom, the hidden wing and specifically the underground lab/hospital. But frankly speaking, the movie probably satisfies Ledoyen's fans more than horror or drama moviegoers.
STORY The story is set in the late 1950's at an orphanage in the French Alps. The plot revolves around Anna who is pregnant because she was gang-raped by her employees, or so it seemed. There is a scene where she had a nightmare, whereby for a couple of seconds, we see her being rendered unconscious in the company of 6-8 naked men.
This incident traumatised her and she can't accept her condition. In fact throughout the movie Anna shows her disgust towards her baby and even attempts to abort it in one scene. Ironically, she seems to be intrigued by the orphanage history of some dead children. The story progresses as we see Anna trying to decipher the mystery of these 'scary children', apparitions of child-ghosts that roam the old orphanage.
Through her ordeal, Anna befriends a mentally unstable girl by the name of Judith, who we later find out was one of the surviving 300 World War II orphans that were brought to St. Ange in 1946. Apparently these children were brought to the orphanage under dire conditions, and since there were only two 'lousy' doctors available, many of them didn't survive.
Again through Anna's mischievous curiosity, she and Judith manage to find a secret passage through the communal children bathroom into an abandoned children wing of the orphanage. Within this wing there is an elevator that goes several stories underground. Anna takes the elevator and comes out in an alternate dimension, whereby she arrives in a clean pseudo-experimental hospital. What she finds there is surreal, scary and disturbing.
It is likely that the orphanage is sitting on top of a Nazi experimental laboratory, where they performed experiments on Jewish children. Anna later gives birth to her stillborn baby with the help of the scary children. They both die in the process and become ghosts themselves.
WHAT I THINK There were a few goose-bumps throughout the middle section of the movie, but they failed to lift up my interest as it seemed the director didn't know which way to take the movie. And it certainly didn't help when the bulk of the running time was spent filming trivial scenes of Anna, where it was tempting to say that the director was more enamored with Virginie Ledoyen the actress, than progressing the story along a definite narration.
I think there was so much potential to the movie. Potentials for genuinely scary moments that could've been shot in the children communal bathroom, the hidden wing and specifically the underground lab/hospital. But frankly speaking, the movie probably satisfies Ledoyen's fans more than horror or drama moviegoers.