In the early scenes we see Laura as a seven-year-old child who is being removed from an orphanage where she interacts with the other children and seems at home. She will be missed and she’ll miss her playmates. Thirty years later, with Laura married and with a seven-year-old young son, she takes over the by then abandoned orphanage and reopens it as a place to care for handicapped children. The boy, Simón, played most appealingly by Roger Príncep, is given to having imaginary friends and fixates on one called Tómas. In the midst of a party celebrating the opening day of the children’s center, Simón disappears, and so begins Laura’s frantic search for the boy, which plunges her into an all-consuming journey into her memories and the reality of events that took place in her childhood.

You can let your imagination go to work from there. The plot becomes intricate, a connection between the dead and the living, with strange occurrences along the way. A mysterious woman turns up one day. A séance is held by a medium portrayed by Geraldine Chaplin. Laura’s husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) tries to convince Laura to leave, but to no avail.

What makes the film work so well is the atmosphere that the director and the screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez create. The stock in trade gambits of horror films are used advantageously, but amount to much more because of the human emotions involved. This is not a film geared merely to shock, but one meant to involve you in Laura’s fascinating, emotionally wrought and obsessive journey.

I also see a possible political meaning in the film, whether or not it is intended—coming to grips with the past as a metaphor for Spain’s ongoing struggle to come to grips with its past, namely the residue from its Civil War.