The Orphanage, a wonderful Spanish horror film, circles you like an expert fighter, knocking you down each time you come up from the canvas. It isn’t just your legs that turn to jelly, it is your mind and feelings. Yet something – a morbid enthralment? the inner detective in your soul? – stays alert, excited, thrillingly perplexed.

In the gaunt ex-orphanage on the rocky coast, seven-year-old Simón vanishes inexplicably, soon after arriving at his new home with his adoptive parents. Mum Laura (Belén Rueda), a former child at the orphanage, is desperate. Can she woo Simón back from what cannot, surely, be death? It must be some ghostly dimension where he plays with the other ghost-children glimpsed, at least by Laura, in fleeting, Turn of the Screw-like moments. And who is the beady-eyed old woman who visits one day and is re-met, late one night, lurking in the garden shed? (This is one of the moments in which we jump two feet from our seats.) And what happened to the disfigured child who died, many years ago, in a tide-flooded cave?