Fragile (Frágiles)

  Fragile is a 2005 Spanish/English English-language coproduction from Jaume Balaguerró, who directs and wrote the script with Jordi Galceran.

 It stars Single Female Lawyer herself Calista Flockheart as Amy, an American nurse who's just transferred to a hospital in the Isle of Wight to cover for another nurse who left in mysterious circumstances. The hospital is in the process of being closed down, all the patients transferred to another local facility, but the move's been put on hold due to a train crash. And someone needs to take care of the last remaining patients - half a dozen children - until that's resolved.

She's pretty big in Omicron Persei 8.

 The skeleton crew left behind to look after the kids also includes two doctors (Gemma Jones and Richard Roxburgh) and the day shift nurse (Elena Anaya). Other than the move it seems like a regular hospital... until you find out that the second floor was shut down back in the fifties and left to moulder ever since, fully furnished. You know, the sort of perfectly normal thing that could totally happen outside of a horror movie.

 Amy immediately fixates on one of the patients - Maggie (Yasmin Murphy), a huge-eyed moppet who insists she talks to an imaginary friend called Charlotte. Given the genre, and that we saw in a prologue an invisible force breaking a kid's femur in two places, you know what that means. It's not long before Amy sees enough weirdness to convince her that there is indeed a force of evil haunting the hospital, one that's fixated on the children in general and Maggie in particular. Cue a particularly annoying instance of trying to convince her coworkers that she's not crazy...

 This is not a good or particularly interesting ghost story; It looks professional enough, and there is a fairly cool twist regarding the identity of the spook at the center of the tale, but it's undone by some piss-poor dialog, uninteresting characters and some unwittingly funny horror moments. I admire how over the top it gets, but unfortunately not the execution of said mayhem, which involves some poor staging and a lot of ropey '00s CGI. The bloodletting fares better; There's not a lot of it, but a scene with a broken canula needle effectively rattled me, as it's something I've imagined happening to me before.
 Oh, and for those keeping tally, there's quite a few creepy/possessed toys, the most prominent of which are a set of haunted letter blocks.

 I have a lot of time for Jaume Balagueró; He may not be nearly as good a stylist as his REC co-director Paco Plaza, but he did do Mientras Duermes (Sleep Tight), a delightfully fucking evil movie if there ever was one. This, however, is disposable entertainment, an easily forgettable slab of ghostly cheese despite some good ambiance, a cool monster and some mild cleverness.