got it figured out

Ok here goes.

Nothing evil was done to the children at saint ange during the war. The staff are kind people who did their best to save as many children as they could, but there were too many and limited resources, so some of the children died.

Anna arrives to begin working at st ange. She does not want to become a mother and is trying to kill her unborn child. It's hard to blame her. It can't have been easy to find safe abortions in 1958 france.

But anna is also insane, prone to hallucinations and paranoia. She also has a nice rack but that's beside the point.

So she invents a conspiracy involving ghost children, and evil nuns who helped the nazis conduct medical experiments on orphans during the war, and sets herself up as the savior of these children to compensate for her feelings of guilt about killing her fetus, and general reluctance to become a mother.

She enlists the equally insane Marie (name?) in her imaginary crusade, gets her to stop taking the medication she needs, and convinces her that something horrible was done to the children long ago.

btw the episode with Marie and the kittens is a version in miniature of what's happening with Anna and her child. She doesn't want to take care of the kittens so she drowns them, forgets she did it and blames the staff.

Later anna and marie go sneaking around, bust the mirrors in the bathroom and break tino a wing of the orphanage that was shut up because of the bad memories, and BECAUSE THE BOARDS ARE ROTTING AND IT'S UNSAFE.

Anna crawls into what appears to be a coal shute (???) and here's where the hallucination begins. She imagines it to be an elevator that takes her into a secret underground laboratory where zombie/ doctor children who jump up out of womb-like vats of slimy water and resemble fetuses, surround her chanting "mother, mother" and force her to give birth against her wishes.

This part of the movie is a 20-minute hallucination in which Anna succumbs to her feelings of guilt and reluctance to become a mother.

What actually happened is this: She stepped into the coal shute, stepped out into the same room after a few minutes, stumbled around in the dark, pushed out a stillbirth on the floor and died as a result of the physical abuse she has been inflicting on herself for the past month.

The cook and the head nun or whatever find her later and decide to call the police. notice they are not nervous at all, as they should be if they really were concealing horrible secrets in a subterannean dungeon. that was all in Anna and Marie's mind.

Marie is off her meds, so she has a hallucination on the way out of the hospital. She sees what she wants to see, anna has become the mother that her childhood friends never had.

pretty ok movie really. with some hot ladies too : )