"Juan Antonio Bayona's accomplished first feature is a chiller playing for high emotional stakes. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, the Latin doyen of contemporary horror, the film is a right-up-to-date spin on del Toro's staple concerns of childhood fantasy and troubled female characters, with hot button topics of child abuse and pervasive surveillance technology added to the mix.

Young mother Laura and her husband return with their young son, Simon, to the neighborhood where she was raised in a long-abandoned orphanage. Sinister goings-on among a group of children Simon befriends culminate in his disappearance. Laura finally resorts to a medium who reveals that the children may have links to her own childhood. Belén Rueda (The Sea Inside) gives a tour-de-force performance as the increasingly obsessive Laura in this unsettling tale of maternal madness that - though referencing recent Hispanic hits including The Others (moral guilt and punishment), and Pan's Labyrinth (fascism as an agent of fear) - stands proudly alone. Bayona's perfect execution of genre expectations proves him to be one of the year's most welcome new talents." -PSIFF 2008