Originally called Saint-Ange, this is a French import that has gone through a retitling for the American audience. Apparently, it did not do well at the box office in its native land. Seems a shame, too, because I found it to be an entertaining, if flawed psychological horror.
The film opens in an orphanage. A young boy awakens and goes down the hall to the bathroom. On the way, he comes across a young girl who also wishes to go. Together they make their way to the large bathroom. The boy looks for a working faucet, while the girl says that the "others" like to play with them. While on their way back, the boy hears something and goes back, gets up on the edge of a tub to look in a mirror then falls off, to his death.
Move ahead in time: Anna arrives at the orphanage just as it is being emptied. Apparently all of the children are being moved out. Anna has been hired to help clean up the run down building. She remains there with Helenka, the cook, and Judith, an unstable young woman who has lived there for as long as she can remember.
It is not long before Anna begins to experience things and hear voices and footsteps in the distance. Anna has a past of her own which may be coming into play, as it is revealed that she is trying to hide a pregnancy and has clearly been whipped by a former employer. All of this leads to her fragile state of mind, as she starts to look into the past of the house. It is learned that the house played home to a number of children after World War II, children that had been smuggled from the clutches of the Nazis who had performed experiments on them.
Judith and Helenka are aware of the past. Judith may have been one of those children, while Helenka was working there when they arrived. Neither one is talking. Helenka keeps a vow of silence, and uses drugs to keep Judith comfortably numb. The introduction of Anna brings with it an unknown factor, one that seems desperate to find out the secret of the children. Perhaps, in order to understand her own pregnancy.
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