This is a Spanish horror film by Guillermo Del Toro, his third feature. The effects are really quite good and subtle, by Del Toro standards. He is one of the masters of seamless CGI. The story is decent, a haunted orphanage set during the Spanish Civil War, and it's refreshing that it doesn't try and sucker you or trick you in any way. The bad guy is definitely the guy you immediately assume he is.It's 1939 and young Carlos (Fernando Tielve) has been taken to an orphanage for his safety. He doesn't know it, but his father has died during the Civil War. The head mistress Carmen (Marisa Paredes) is a leftist sympathizer and has a cache of gold ingots hidden in a safe. Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), the handyman, keeps trying to break into the safe so he can steal the gold and run away to Granada. Carlos tries to make friends with the other boys, except for Jaime (Inigo Garces), the bully. He doesn't know until later that the bed assigned to him used to belong to Jaime's friend Santi (Junio Valverde) who disappeared. But Carlos doesn't think Santi ran away. He's pretty sure that the missing boy is also "he who sighs", a ghost haunting the basement reservoir. Carlos has to figure out exactly how all the threads entwine so he can bring the spirit closure.
Like I said, it's a decent ghost story. The effects for Santi are really great, some of the most interesting I've seen as far as subtly off-putting. There were very few outright scares; it's much more dependent on atmosphere. I would put it in the same category as The Others. Not better, but on par.
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