For most audiences, all that’s needed is a shocking “twist” to a horror-ish movie to see past the weaknesses that come before it. If that twist hits right, most forgive or even forget the setup, leaving the water cooler moments only about the sting rather than the preamble. With Jaume Collet-Serra‘s 2009 thriller Orphan, that surprise ending is what most probably let be their measurement for why they liked the film, and honestly, it’s easy to see why. It’s hard to believe the movie is already more than a decade old, but let’s revisit this curious bit of horror and see why it was all the talk on release.
Kate Coleman (Vera Farmiga) is a recovering alcoholic still reeling from the loss of her third child while in delivery. She’s a former Yale professor who was let go, married to John (Peter Sarsgaard), a successful architect trying to be patient with his suffering wife. Their eldest is a twelve-year-old boy named Daniel (Jimmy Bennett), a kid with some peer pressure issues and not quite sure where he fits in the family. And there’s Max (Aryana Engineer), the five-year-old daughter who is mostly deaf, communicating with American Sign Language (and lip reading). They are a seemingly happy family, but Kate feels hollow and with some time and thought, decides she wants to adopt a daughter.
Off to the orphanage they go and soon select on their first visit Ester (Isabelle Fuhrman), a reclusive but highly talented and intelligent nine-year-old girl from Russia with a habit of wearing dresses with distinctive bows around her neck and wrists. She charms the Coleman’s and in a few weeks, is welcomed into their home where she immediately clings to Max while clearly showing disdain for Daniel, who happily reciprocates. Either way, for a short time, it looks like Kate might find her way to happiness, even showing interest in romance with John again. But alas, Ester has other plans for the Coleman’s and soon enough, she brings the pain. Hard.
Movies like this are built on the ending, the screenwriter (in this case David Leslie Johnson) probably working backwards from there, at least in concept. I won’t spoil the film, even if it is eleven years old now, but suffice to say that the final moments are intriguing from a narrative standpoint, a real zinger of a jump off point. It’s clever indeed but because the filmmakers settle on this being a rather basic horror movie, leave it almost entirely unexplored, keeping Ester a manipulative lunatic from start rather than a richly layered character with earned backstory to get where goes.
More so, for me, the premise is a misfire simply because, if what drives her is in fact what she craves in the final act, which is made clear in a history of murders with other families that have adopted her, why spend her life as she does? Yes, we learn she’s never been all that stable and in fact, those pretty bows she adorns herself with hide some troubling secrets, however, it would seem someone as clever and productive as she is, might be able to find far more successful ways to get what she wants instead of leaving behind a trail of corpses and in the state of appearances she chooses. But that’s just me. Watch and see if I make sense.
Either way, the film is extremely well directed by Collet-Serra, who seems to be wanting to make a different kind of movie than what the studio wanted, creating some genuinely interesting and creative moments that suggest there could be more to this than just a straight-up killer on the loose flick. Small, subtle angles and cuts reveal a storyteller looking to generate something emotionally impactful in many of the less dangerous moments, including a very good sequence in the kitchen when Kate lets herself become sexually available again to John. It’s a surprisingly tender and raw moment that Collet-Serra shares with us with simple nods to the movements and placement of their hands and the space between them, building an intimate and personal segment that we see means something different to the two involved. Good stuff. And there are more like it throughout.
However, the story is all too conventional to be taken seriously, with boring school bullies, a lazy cliché of a treehouse, and a whole thing with water and thin ice. That’s not to mention the larger weakness in the central plot in driving the split between John and Kate, he on Ester’s side and Kate against. It’s an old trope, but either way, John is so passive in all this, he’s practically asleep, and well, pays a dear price, but there’s little in convincing us that he would so readily side with Ester and not at least consider what is happening in his own house. After a while, you’re just thinking, “C’mon, man! Look around.”
But back to some good. Farmiga is, as usual, very fun to watch, her traumatic breakdown given enough room to feel authentic and even a little tragic, no matter how hard you wonder why she feels such need for an adoption. Farmiga has this sort of built in sorrow about her that works in a lot of the roles she takes, and here, even with the silliness that it builds to, keeps us grounded in Kate’s fight to save her family. It’s just too bad the screenplay is so generic, refusing to be the least bit challenging in giving some depth to the personalities rather than pencil thin symbolism.
So, while Orphan is a by the number chiller, it nonetheless remains a sort of “gotta see it” movie, just for the sheer absurdity of it all. Some fans revel in this corner of the genre and that’s great, as the film certainly caters to the crowd and surely must deliver. No matter where you stand, it’s worth a look for the laughs or the frights you get out of it.