"The Orphanage" doesn't need special effects to terrify us, just one subtly disturbing idea: The scariest ghosts are the ones we create ourselves.

The movie, Spain's official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Academy Awards, is set in a former orphanage where one of its old charges, Laura (Bel?n Rueda of "The Sea Inside"), was raised. Now grown, married and the mother of a 7-year-old boy whom she adopted, she intends to turn the institution into a home for special-needs children. But when her son (Roger Pr?ncep) disappears, she becomes convinced that the ghosts of her traumatic school days have returned to capture him.

Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona from a script by Sergio G. S?nchez, "The Orphanage" lures us in with extraordinary subtlety. Keeping sound effects and incidental music to a relative minimum, it builds its suspense almost subliminally. So when something scary or shocking does occur -- deprived of those Hollywood-style cues -- we are truly startled.

And by exploring the psychological terrain of a haunted woman (we are forever wondering if these apparitions are part of Laura's imagination), the movie brings a dimension of reality into this otherworldly situation. This brings us into far more believable, and hence disturbing, intimacy with the other side, that mystical realm that draws us to horror movies and which continues to perplex humankind.

-- Desson Thomson (Jan. 4, 2008)

Contains violence, scary material and profanity. In Spanish with subtitles.