Word: laura
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...movie echoes Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and other literary and cinematic works (including The Others, also by a Spanish director) that investigate the power the dead have over the living, especially over children in the most imaginative and vulnerable stages. It concerns Laura (Belen Rueda), who as a child spent time in the Good Shepherd Orphanage before being adopted. For her the orphanage was not a horror house but the dearest refuge, where she had a half-dozen close friends her age, and which she recalls so fondly that after her marriage to a nice doctor, Carlos...
...Laura wants more: to adopt imperiled children. They already have one: seven-year-old Simon (Roger Princep), a sweet, cheerful, sensitive boy who knows neither that he is adopted nor that he was born HIV positive. Surely Laura and Carlos love him at least as much as any birth child. But they are both beguiled and troubled by Simon's affinity for imaginary friends: Watson and Pepe, whose invisible eccentricities (as related by Simon) they've got used to, and a new companion, Tomas, whose influence seems much more malignant...
...During a lawn party Laura and Carlos arrange for handicapped children, Simon disappears. After six months' searching, he is presumed kidnapped or dead - by everyone but Laura. She has begun to feel palpitations in the old house, hints of other, unquiet spirits. They may mean her harm, if they exist. But Laura, seized by sorrow, believes the voices are speaking to her - that they may have risen from her past to help her find Simon...
...Like Pan's Labyrinth, where the young girl at the center of the film dwelt simultaneously in the horrifying reality of war-ravaged Spain and in a Wonderland retreat of fauns and goblins, The Orphanage zooms along on two parallel tracks. One is realistic, prosaic; it says that Laura's grief over Simon's loss has driven her to desperation and toward suicidal madness. The other, with acknowledgments to J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan, is fantastic, or poetic: it suggests that her grief has opened her to other realities, put her in touch with souls crying from the beyond for justice...
...with the chance to deliver the decisive blow, but went down on three straight fastballs. However, freshman Melissa Schellberg earned a five-pitch walk to load the bases for fellow rookie Jennifer Francis with two outs. After working a full count, Francis lined a one-hopper to second baseman Laura Jaxheimer, who booted the grounder, sending Krysiak and Kidder home.Madick recorded her first two outs of the seventh inning on an unlikely 5-4-7 double play. Jaxheimer moved Dreslinski, who had reached on a leadoff single, to second with a sacrifice bunt. But Dreslinski, seeing third base unoccupied, tried...