MovieChat Forums > El orfanato (2008) Discussion > What did really happen with the children...

What did really happen with the children? (spoilers)


I wondered how Benigna could have killed all 5 children and incinerate their bodies (in an oven with wooden doors?!) without anyone else noticing. That is just pretty much impossible.

Let's assume the other staff did not suspect she laced the cake with poison. Wouldn't they have heard the children's screams and called a doctor? Even if the poison had no immediate effect and they didn't hear the children at night, they would've called the police in the morning, unless they panicked and decided to fabricate some story about the children being moved to another house or something. And then they burned the bodies but never even buried the remains?

Seems like a huge plot hole to me. One explanation that makes a bit of sense is that the staff did not panick but conspired to get rid of the children for whatever reason. Still, why weren't the children buried? Also, note that it is not clear the poisoning ever happened. Only the ghost hunters' medium claimed this.

Of course Benigna could have been the only one around when she poisoned the kids, the other staff might have been away (e.g. at a convention). She hadn't worked there for a long time, so she could've been the one who had to stay. But she had recently lost her own son, so would they leave her alone? And how could she explain the children having disappeared?

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Benigna most likely blackmailed the other staff with her super8 footage of Tomas being maltreated. The other staff could have gone to the police after the children's deaths but Benigna would have shown the cops her film and maybe even implicated the other carers for the children's fatal poisoning as well as Tomas's accidental death- there's probably a very good reason why Benigna chose to film one of the other carers feeding the kids at the dinner table. Also, the image of a masked Tomas being grabbed by one of the older members of staff and roughly pulled back into the building certainly doesn't look good. So my theory is that the staff were in a stalemate situation- if they grassed Benigna up to the law, they too would face the consequences.

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Just one note about the ovens:
I'm not sure they were incinerated in those ovens. I think that oven was only used to bury their bodies, as they were each in individual bags that were not burned. It would seem petty to burn a body, bag the ashes (however a lot of the body remained in tact), and then keep it somewhere while she burned the next body, bagged it, etc. and then hide each of the bodies together back in the same oven.
I've only watched it once, so I might be mistaken, but I can't remember if the bodies were positively incinerated or simply decomposed and disintegrating. In either case, it only seems logical to me that that oven was a burial place, nothing more.

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As I recall the bags had a lot of ashes and then a few bone fragments, a jaw, metal brace that wouldn't burn. However I could be wrong and perhaps each body was put into a bag and then over the years decomposed inside the bag.

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I just finished the film a few minutes ago. The bags were definitely filled with ashes and a few bones that didn't burn. I hadn't thought about someone (Benigna?) actually shoveling ashes and bones (and the little girl's brace!) into bags and hiding them, but that's what they must have done.

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I just finished the film a few minutes ago. The bags were definitely filled with ashes and a few bones that didn't burn. I hadn't thought about someone (Benigna?) actually shoveling ashes and bones (and the little girl's brace!) into bags and hiding them, but that's what they must have done.

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I think that she put the bodies in bags fill with lime, that material can consume the corpses but left some bones and metal pieces.

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