If ghosts are anywhere, we would expect to find them in an old derelict orphans' home. But Laura wouldn't. She has good memories of the place.

In director Juan Antonio Bayona's feature-film debut (in Spanish with subtitles), Laura (Belen Rueda) returns to the stately Good Shepherd Orphanage where she was raised. She and husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) have happy plans to restore and resurrect it as a center for disabled kids. But it doesn't seem so happy to their 7-year-old son, Simon (Roger Princep).

Simon adjusts to his creepy new surroundings -- shades of "The Shining" -- by discovering a group of imaginary friends who leave not-quite-imaginary footprints in the sand. They play cryptic (or sinister?) games and search for hidden treasures (or horrors?).

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'The Orphanage'

• Starring: Belen Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Geraldine Chaplin.
• Rating: R for disturbing content.
• Web site: theorphanagemovie.com

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Laura is slowly drawn into Simon's eerie universe -- especially after the boy disappears during a costume party. Was he kidnapped? The cops and cop-psychiatrists are stumped. Laura is beside herself. She engages not just a medium but, well, a variety of mixed media in her obsessive search for her son -- and/or his deformed doppelganger -- among "The Orphanage's" lost boys and girls.

This ghost story relies on your standard haunted-house tropes: spooky shadows, self-slamming windows, slow-turning doorknobs, dusty secret crypts. But director Bayona and screenwriter Sergio Sánchez fashion them fairly freshly, eschewing the special FX excess that rules the genre these days.

Instead, we are lured in subtly, with a build-up of suspense rather than shock. Bayona takes time (a bit too much of it) to create a sense of place and reveal its secrets gradually rather than by periodic orgies of gore.

Haunting photography and production design play a big part. Rueda ("The Sea Inside") plays a bigger one. Her intensely visceral Laura is matched by Geraldine Chaplin's terrific supporting performance (speaking perfect Spanish) as Aurora:

"When something terrible happens, sometimes it leaves a trace," says that clairvoyant lady, being regressed for forensic purposes. "Seeing is not believing. It's the other way around."

Like "Pan's Labyrinth" (whose director, Guillermo del Toro, is this film's producer), "The Orphanage" combines the real world with the past and present of an alternate supernatural one. But this Wendy has a lot of trouble just getting to and from her Neverland -- which makes this "Peter Pan's Labyrinth" drag at times.

Nevertheless, it is so well done that you can forgive it its trespasses, including its dubious ending, which critics were (more than usually) asked not to give away.

No need to worry about that here. I haven't the slightest idea what it really was.