J. A. Bayona makes films about ordinary people in the minute the floor gives way, and he is at his best in the quiet before it does. The waiting is superb; the weeping that follows is sometimes more than the scene has earned.
Fi1m perspective
A mother, a child, an outside privy at night, a noise through the wall. The first episode of Penny Dreadful (2014) opens with almost nothing happening, and J. A. Bayona lets it go on not happening for longer than most directors would dare. We sat still and stopped breathing properly, and the reason was simple: he had shown us nothing, and kept showing us nothing, until nothing was unbearable. The scare, when it comes, is ordinary. The wait is what we remembered, and it is the most Bayona thing in the series.
The career is a slow walk out of a small room. He trained at ESCAC in Barcelona and spent his twenties on music videos and commercials before The Orphanage (2007), a ghost story produced by Guillermo del Toro that set the pattern: a family, a house, and loss doing the haunting. The Impossible (2012) took him into English and into the 2004 tsunami, and its disaster sequences are the reason people still talk about it. A Monster Calls (2016), which walks a drawn creature into a live-action film, completed a trilogy of sorts about mothers and children. Then the big jobs arrived, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and the first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022), before he went back to a story he wanted enough to write and produce himself, Society of the Snow (2023), about a plane down in the Andes.
What he does well is the moment the ordinary tips. He has said it plainly: "What interests me is when the ordinary becomes extraordinary." A morning by the sea, a boy and his drawings, a flight over mountains; then the water, the monster, the snow. He shoots the before with patience and the during at full pitch, and the second works because we have been given the first. More often than not there is a mother and a son at the centre of it, which gives the wreckage someone to hold on to.
What he does less well is stopping. Once the catastrophe has done its work he tends to keep pressing, and the strings and the tears arrive to insist on a feeling the pictures had already produced. The Orphanage has been faulted for this and the charge is not unfair. The studio film showed the other risk: in Fallen Kingdom the set pieces were his and the film around them was anyone's. He is worth watching when the story is his own, and those are the ones to seek out. Bring a handkerchief, and keep hold of it; he will ask for it a beat before the scene deserves it.
Biography
J. A. Bayona, born Juan Antonio García Bayona on 9 May 1975 in Barcelona, is a Spanish film director. He studied at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya (ESCAC) and began his career directing television commercials and music videos.
His feature films include The Orphanage (2007), The Impossible (2012), A Monster Calls (2016), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Society of the Snow (2023). He directed the first two episodes of the series Penny Dreadful (2014) and the first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022). His work has received multiple Goya Awards.
