(2007; Spanish) Juan Antonio Bayona directed this haunting, occasionally spine-tingling tale from an original screenplay by Sergio G. Sánchez of lost children from the Good Shepherd Orphanage.

Laura (Belén Rueda), formerly an adoptee from the orphanage, and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo), a physician, have a seven-year-old adopted boy, Simón (Roger Princep), who has HIV. Laura and Carlos have kept both facts a secret from Simón who plays with two imaginary friends. The family has taken up residence in what had been the orphanage. Laura tells her son fanciful stories and reads to him of Peter Pan and Neverland.

Below the grounds on the beach near the lighthouse, she shows Simón a cave where he discovers another invisible boy, Tomás. An elderly woman pays a visit, introducing herself as Benigna (Montserrat Carulla), a social worker, offering an experimental program for treating Simón; Laura tells her to leave. At night Benigna intrudes on the property.

Simón becomes precocious, informing his mother: "I won't grow old. I won't grow up." He says he has six friends who have told him if he can discover the treasure they've stolen and hidden, he will be granted a wish. He and Laura begin with his baby teeth, searching for clues until they find his father's old coins. Tomás has told him that Carlos and Laura are not his real parents and that he soon will die.

During a carnival party Laura and Carlos host for deprived children, Simón gets slapped for being assertively surly with his mother; he then disappears. Searching for him, Laura comes upon a child wearing a sack over his head; when she tries to remove it, he pushes her into the bathroom and locks the door. After Carlos releases her, she becomes hysterical, running to the beach where she imagines seeing Simón in the cave as the tide rushes in. The police find no one in the cave; a forensic psychologist, Pilar (Mabel Rivera), hypothesizes the possibility of kidnapping by a relation.

Six months later with no trace or clue of Simón, Laura and Carlos attend a bereavement group, though Laura refuses to accept her son is dead, even though he would need medication to remain alive. "I'm not crazy," she insists. Traveling in their car, Laura unexpectedly sees Benigna in the street, just before she's run over by another vehicle and killed. From Benigna's home photographs are found with her among the orphans, including Laura.

Citing Carl Jung's theory of the subconscious, a lecturer speaks of doppelgangers, twins who can provide a passport into a parallel world of the spirits, which raises Laura's hopes of locating Simón through a medium's efforts. Surrounded by electronic equipment, Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin) enters a trance inside the old orphanage, eventually finding (tape recorders collecting the audio) the voices of five dying children crying inside the bathroom. Afterward Aurora explains what she heard and saw as a knot in time, an echo, a scar from an old wound in the past. Pilar dismisses the session as a trick; Carlos tells Laura that these people aren't interested in their child, they just want to contact the dead. But Aurora advises Laura: "Believe and you will see."

Another treasure hunt begins leading Laura to bags containing old bones of children, whom she'd known at the orphanage, with evidence implicating Benigna. Perhaps she's hallucinating as repressed memories of her childhood float to the surface. Laura convinces Carlos, who wants to vacate the premises, to allow her just two days alone to continue playing the game with the ghostly children. "One, two, three, knock on the wall."

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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