Orphan (2009)

Orphan (2009)

On a sleepless night, I found myself drawn to the TV for company. On the table sat my brother’s copy of ‘Orphan’ which he had just gotten for Christmas. I looked down at the DVD and knew it was about to be watched. I am a horror film lover and I will contend that there is no better time to watch a horror movie than at around 1am, alone, in the dark. And so I sat down with Jaume Collet-Serra’s “Orphan.”

The set up has been done before, many times – “The Omen” (1976), “Child’s Play 2,” (1990) “The Good Son” (1993), to name a few antecedents – a struggling family decides the best thing for it would be to adopt a child with a troubled past. Lo and behold, the child not only has a troubled past but turns out to be just plain trouble.

There can be no doubt: “Orphan” is a dark film. Thankfully, it is not overly clustered with action and horror like so many contemporary counterparts. Instead it lets the horror rise and rise until the final, genuinely creepy climax. Of course there are the typical fake outs to juice up the audience for the real scares - a woman opens a mirrored medicine cabinet. When she closes it, someone is standing behind her (gasp!). And then there’s Esther, the creepy orphan of the title who holds the real horror of the film in the palm of her hand.

As you can likely infer from what I’ve already written, the plot doesn’t need too much elaboration. Vera Farmiga plays Kate Coleman, a recovered alcoholic who has recently suffered a miscarriage. Kate and her husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) decide it would be best to adopt a child. Now, I’m pretty young and have no children, but it seems to me that adopting a child in the wake of a miscarriage might be predicated on faulty logic – a hasty cure for the mourning heart.

Well, despite my reservations, Kate and John adopt Esther, a young orphan from Russia. Esther is an instant hit with the family, befriending Kate’s younger and partially deaf daughter Max and her older son Daniel. Esther even seems to have an Oedipal (or Electrapal…Electric?) love for her father. Cute enough.

But as can be imagined, things start to go awry. A girl has a conspicuous fall from a playground. A car’s emergency break is mysteriously released. A nun is found bludgeoned to death…

Kate is the only one who can fit these pieces together. She is the only one who sees the common thread between all these tragic incidents is Esther. But no one believes her of course, because how could a child do such a thing?

Children in the movies are much like dogs. They can be cute and funny as easily as they can be vicious and creepy. Esther, played by newcomer Isabelle Fuhrman, is a powerhouse of a creeper. She delivers on scary material that would be tough for any child actor to make believable. At 3am when the film ended, I couldn’t help but wonder how they made this film with such strict child-actor laws in place. This movie actually creeped me out.

Rating:

On a scale of one to Casablanca, this film is a “The Others” (2001)

Rationalization:

In these, the waning days of M. Night Shymalan, it is very hard to come across a twist ending where you don’t feel used and didn’t see it coming from eight miles away. Nowadays we often come into a horror movie expecting there will be a game changing twist tagged on at the very end. In a case like Shymalan’s “The Village” (2004), which I loved for the first half, the twist made me want to puke and then write a heated letter to someone who would listen. But with a movie like “The Others,” and now “Orphan,” the twist is organic, makes sense, and adds a brand new dimension of scariness to the rest of the film. At the end of “The Village” I felt like I needed to take a sponge bath to scrub off Shymalan’s twist and egomania. Not so at the end of “Orphan.”

(Also, if you’re watching this on DVD and can check out the alternative ending, do so. The part of me that despises closure loved the alternative ending)