Throw The Innocents, Sixth Sense and Hook into a blender and you might come close to The Orphanage. It’s hard to describe it any other way and it’ll take at least another viewing for me to feel like I know what I’m even talking about while talking about it, except without any doubt to say that I found it just as good as people have been saying for the past year.

I think Mark Kermode said he counted 4 separate scares in the movie – I have to say only one really lifted me out of my seat and I’m pretty sure it must be the one he talked about that the stranger grabbed his arm over. For me, it’s the emotional content of it all that affected me most. There’s just a constant terror in the very atmosphere of the movie as a result of the mystery that builds around a young boy and his games, his imaginary friends and his mother’s attempts to understand. To even try to attempt a plot summary beyond that after a single viewing would be crazy – all I can say is, it’s beautiful. Sorry, review brain’s just not been up to the task lately, lol, you’ll just have to see for yourself.

This movie felt a little surreal to me. It starts out in a perfect perfect cheesy world, everybody smiley and nothing could possibly go wrong, which is sometimes fine but here gets just a little annoying. Most of the acting is pretty bad and the production design feels too clean and simplistic – Samantha’s Uncle Gard looks frighteningly like he stepped out of Timothy Hines’ The War of the Worlds. If it weren’t for AnnaSophia Robb I would’ve been struggling to keep watching.

Halfway, though, the movie really changes gear, goes a little darker, and by the end I had kind of completely surrendered to it. It’s a good Christmas movie too, something I wasn’t expecting. It’s far from being a great movie, and though I haven’t read any of the American Girl books the adaptation feels way too slapdash, like one of the recent Harry Potter movies, leaping from episode to episode, a little blinding for non-readers; but if you want a little cuteness in your life this Christmas, you can’t go wrong here.