Is The Orphanage Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot
Yes, 6 out of 10. It has plenty of jump scares, and it is far sadder than a ghost story needs to be.
🐱THE SCARE SIGNAL
SCARE SCORE
6 /10
🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱
DREAD LEVEL
Medium
The scares fade by morning, but the sadness can last a night longer.
DOG
Dog: fine
fine, no dog dies.
Ruling: Watch it in daylight with tissues nearby, because the jump scares are the smaller problem.
The Orphanage runs 105 minutes. A woman moves her family into the orphanage she grew up in, and her seven-year-old son says he has made a friend there. The friend is named Tomás, and he wears a sack on his head.
The premise, briefly
Laura returns to the orphanage where she grew up to reopen it as a home for disabled children, and her adopted son starts talking to a boy in a sack mask.
How much do you want to know?
🐱
The verdict above is spoiler-free. Everything below, including the ending, stays hidden until you pick a depth.
🐱CUT TO THE CHASE
How it ends
Simón is dead: he fell and broke his neck in a hidden room that Laura had accidentally blocked the night he vanished. Laura takes what looks like an overdose of sleeping pills and joins Simón and the orphans' spirits, and Carlos later smiles as a door opens.
The scene you're dreading
Near the end, Laura follows the spirits to a hidden underground room and finds Simón's body wearing Tomás's mask. She then works out how he got there.
The dog
No dog dies in The Orphanage, and no animal does either.
It is a sad ghost story with plenty of jump scares, and the ending is gentler than the rest of the movie suggests.
THE SHORT VERSION IS HIDDEN
How it ends, the scene you're dreading, what happens to the dog, and the bottom line. About twenty seconds to read.
What actually happens
A reopening plan for a building with a coal shed
Laura was adopted out of a Spanish orphanage as a girl. Thirty years later she returns to the closed building with her husband Carlos and their son Simón, who is seven, planning to reopen it as a home for disabled children. Simón says he has made a friend named Tomás and draws him as a boy wearing a sack mask. A social worker named Benigna shows up to ask about Simón, and it comes out that the couple adopted him and that he is HIV-positive. Laura throws her out, then finds her in the coal shed that night, and Benigna runs. Simón then teaches Laura a game that grants the winner a wish, and a trail of clues leads them to his adoption file. Simón gets angry and says his friend told him she is not his real mother, and that he will die soon.
At the opening party Laura and Simón argue, and she slaps him in a moment of frustration that she regrets immediately. Simón hides. While Laura looks for him, a child in a sack mask shoves her into a bathroom and locks the door. When she gets out, Simón is gone, and that night she hears loud crashes inside the walls. A police psychologist named Pilar suggests that Benigna may have taken him. Six months later he is still missing. Laura sees Benigna wheeling a doll in a pram just before an ambulance runs her over. The police then find that Benigna worked at the orphanage and had a son, Tomás, who lived there but was kept hidden because of a facial deformity. He wore a mask to cover it. The other orphans stole the mask, Tomás refused to come out of a sea cave where he was hiding, and the tide came in and drowned him.
A séance with a payoff in the coal shed
Laura asks a medium named Aurora to help her find Simón. Aurora holds a séance and says the ghosts of the orphans are crying out for help. Laura then finds the remains of the children she grew up with. Benigna had poisoned their meals as revenge for Tomás's death and hidden their bodies in the coal shed, which is the same shed where Laura caught her earlier in the story. Carlos cannot cope with any of this and leaves the orphanage, so Laura keeps looking for Simón on her own.
Simón's wish, found behind a hidden door
This is the scene people dread most, and it comes near the end. Laura restores the orphanage to how it looked thirty years earlier and plays one of the orphans' old games to call their spirits. They lead her to a door to a hidden underground room. Inside she finds Simón's body, wearing Tomás's mask. Laura works out what happened: on the night of the party she moved pieces of construction scaffolding that blocked the secret room's entrance, the crashes in the walls were Simón trying to get out, and he fell and broke his neck.
The ending, explained
Laura takes what looks like an overdose of sleeping pills. As she lies dying she asks to be with Simón, and the spirits of the orphans appear, including Tomás, who has taken off his mask and no longer minds his face. Simón is with them. Simón explains that he wished for Laura to stay and look after the orphans, and she happily tells them a story while Tomás gets the others to sit down and listen. Sometime later Carlos visits a memorial for Laura, Simón and the orphans. In the old bedroom where the orphans slept, he finds a medallion he had told Laura to give back once she found Simón. The door opens behind him, he turns to look, and he smiles.
The post-credits ruling
Nobody has confirmed whether there's a scene after the credits.
✓ Spoiled safelyDog status: fine, no dog dies.
Questions people ask at 1am
Is The Orphanage scary?
Yes, The Orphanage is a 6 out of 10. It has a lot of jump scares and a medium level of dread, and the fear is mixed up with grief, so the sadness lasts longer than the scares.
How does The Orphanage end?
Laura finds Simón's body in a hidden room, takes what looks like an overdose of sleeping pills, and joins Simón and the orphans' spirits, whom she stays to look after. Carlos later visits a memorial and smiles when a door opens.
Does the dog die in The Orphanage?
No, no dog dies in The Orphanage. No animal dies either.
Is there a post-credits scene in The Orphanage?
Nobody has confirmed whether The Orphanage has a scene after the credits.
Who is Tomás in The Orphanage?
Tomás is Benigna's son, a boy who lived at the orphanage and wore a sack mask over a facial deformity. He drowned in a sea cave after the other orphans stole his mask, and he is the friend Simón talks about.
BLURRED FOR YOUR PROTECTION
The whole plot of The Orphanage is hidden, ending included. It stays that way until you ask.
You don't have to sit through The Orphanage to know what happens. Install Scaredy Cat and it will blur horror on the internet before you see it.
