THE highest-grossing film in Spain last year and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a big audience hit at this year’s Viva! Spanish Film Festival at Cornerhouse, The Orphanage is a stylish ghost story more in the tradition of The Innocents or The Others than the gore-fests that most current horror films have become.

It represents the directorial debut of one Juan Antonio Bayana, although, so loudly is his involvement in the production trumpeted on the publicity material, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was the work of Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro.

Visiting Manchester last week for Viva!, Juan was generous about Del Toro’s help as producer. “Making this film simply wouldn’t have been possible without Guillermo,” he insisted. “He has been a good friend and supporter of mine for many, many years, ever since I approached him with this little idea for a movie. We shared a vision, we both have the same idea of what a genre movie actually is.”

The film centres on Laura (Belen Rueda). As a young girl, she was raised in an orphanage before being taken away one day and adopted. Now in her thirties, she has returned with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their young son Simon (Roger Princep) to buy the orphanage and run it as a home for sick or disabled children. But did something terrible happen to the playmates she left behind?

It’s a horrifying possibility that infects her thoughts more and more after Simon takes up with some imaginary friends and then abruptly disappears.

The horror here is cumulative, rather than jumping out in short, sharp shocks, and may not even be happening outside of Laura’s head.

Its reticence gives this intelligent film a genuinely haunting quality.