Fragile (2005)

Fragile arrives from 2005, a Spanish-British production directed by Jaume Balagueró, set in a crumbling children's hospital on the Isle of Wight. A nurse named Amy takes the night shift, bonds with an orphan girl, and learns that a ghost called Charlotte is snapping the bones of the young patients. The film does what ghost stories have always done: it places a vulnerable woman in a decaying building and lets the floorboards do the talking. There is no thesis here, no argument about how we ought to live. Just a trapdoor, a film reel, and a girl in orthotic braces.

Amy is played by Calista Flockhart with a furrowed, protective warmth, and she is the sort of heroine the genre has produced for decades: competent, maternal, willing to bleed for a child. We can call this a female-led narrative, and it is, but the film has no interest in interrogating anything about that. The supporting cast is white and British and Spanish almost without exception, with Colin McFarlane appearing briefly as Roy, the operations manager, before the ghost sends him through a window. His presence is a fact of the production, not a statement. The children suffer from cystic fibrosis and brittle bone disease, and their ailments exist to generate dread, not to educate us about the body's many configurations.

The film's lone gesture toward something like social awareness is its sympathy for orphans, which is older than cinema itself. Otherwise we get psychics, a haunted elevator shaft, and a resurrection by the kiss of a dead child. It is a well-made, modest, entirely untroubling piece of work. The cultural studies department can go home early. Somewhere a sommelier of ideology swirls the glass, finds nothing, and sets it down.