By Sabrina Cognata

At the beginning of this movie the screen dazzled me with everything I like to see:  good looking people, good looking places and well, in short GOOD LOOKING.  Immediately, I start having fantasies of moving to Spain in a mansion on the beach with a cute Spanish boyfriend and I am in bliss.  By the end of this movie I am ready to drop kick any children that speak Spanish.  In short, THE SPANISH ARE TERRIFYING.  My actual though is that the Spanish are f*cking terrifying, but they won’t even let me use that word here, so what’s the point?  The point is that it really is scary enough to use that expletive.

This is the story of Laura (Belén Rueda) and her family.  Laura is this cute Spanish chick with a nice rack that obviously fake and she talks her husband into buying the orphanage she was in as a child so they can run it together, taking care of ill children.  Speaking of ill children, Laura’s son Simón (Roger Príncep) is adopted and HIV positive.  Oh, and her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo) is hot.  He is a hot doctor and together they are going to save the world and other children like Simón.  Anyways, after Simón settles into the house he keeps talking about the children that live there that are his “imaginary” friends playing imaginary treasure hunt games.  No one really gives any thought to the fact that the HIV+ kid is talking to himself even though the house is spooky as hell.

So this crazy old bat, Benigna (Montserrat Carulla) shows up saying that she’s a social worker and she wants to talk about how Simón is HIV+ and Laura flips out and kicks the old bat out of the house.  Later that night Laura hears something creepy going on outside and finds creepy old Benigna fumbling around with a shovel in the shed.  Things start to rapidly take a turn for the weird and I’m pretty sure the man sitting next to me thought I was making advances at him when I literally jumped out of my seat and into his.  So stupid Laura goes looking for Simón at the orphanage opening party and some kid wearing a sock puppet mask that I want to kick in the face shoves her in the bathroom and Simón disappears. 


Six months go by and there is no word from or about Simón and Laura’s going insane.  Carlos tries to comfort her.  I mean, HELLO LAURA, YOUR KID HAD THE HIV, EVENTUALLY HE WAS GOING TO DIE ANYWAYS.  So Laura and Carlos are driving along one day and Laura sees Benigna pushing along a bassinet.  Laura jumps out of the car and screams Benigna’s name, Benigna turns around and see Laura and gets run over by a car.  Carlos goes into doctor mode, but he cannot save Benigna.  Later we find out that Benigna is a former employee of the orphanage and mother of a creepy deformed son that died when some of the kids played a trick on him that resulted in his death. 

Laura continues to go insane over her son’s disappearance and she contacts a medium and asks for help.  After the medium comes to the house Carlos finally loses it and tells Laura that she needs to get out of the house because it is making her mad.  Laura starts screaming at the children that live there and tell them to play with her.  They take her to the shed where she finds all the bodies of the children that accidentally killed Benigna’s son.  BENIGNA IS A PSYCHO KILLER OF KIDS.  Anyways, after finding this Laura tells him that she needs to know what happened and once she does she will leave.  Carlos agrees to give Laura two days alone in the house and then Laura transforms the house to look the way it did when she was a child and she plays some game with the ghosts asking them to take her to Simón.  They do with ONE PROBLEM!  Simón found the place where they hid Benigna’s deformed son and when Laura was hunting for him she accidentally locks him into the hidden room where he eventually trips and dies.  Laura goes bonkers and takes more pills than Marilyn Monroe and is reunited in death with her dead son and the children she grew up with.