Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 23, 2009, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
If it’s not too early to name 2009’s greatest genre guilty pleasure, then that distinction has to go to Orphan, a movie that gets better and better the less one feels the need to take it seriously. And the filmmakers oblige by starting in territory that’s contrived in generic ways and going on to take increasingly higher leaps over the top.
The movie announces its intention to avoid any concessions to good taste right away, with a hospital nightmare in which Kate Coleman (Vera Farmiga) bloodily miscarries, complete with a concluding close-up of the dead, gory fetus. We quickly learn that this bad dream is based on Kate’s reality; she and her husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) have been trying and failing to have a third child, and are going the adoption route instead. At a home for orphaned girls run by Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder), they make the acquaintance of 9-year-old Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), who is preternaturally smart, polite, well-spoken and artistically creative. Not realizing they’re characters in a horror film, Kate and John ignore these obvious warning signs that all is not right with Esther, and decide to bring her into their home.
An evil-child movie is only as good as its evil child, and Orphan has a great one in Fuhrman’s Esther. The young actress, who has only had a few small roles prior to this one, radiates both intelligence and calm malevolence, not to mention a convincing Russian accent—which leads the Colemans’ son Daniel, played by Jimmy Bennett from Star Trek and the Amityville Horror remake, to accuse her of being from Transylvania. Daniel doesn’t care for his new younger sister, whose odd habits and dress are putting a crimp in his social life at school, and Esther at first seems to bond stronger with the Colemans’ little daughter Max (Aryana Engineer)—who, for that extra touch of vulnerability, is deaf. In fact, everyone in the household has some sort of weak spot for Esther to exploit: John once had an affair and Kate struggled with a drinking problem that almost led to a tragedy involving Max.
The first half of Orphan is mostly devoted to setting up these insecurities, as well as other targets for Esther’s wrath, like a classmate who teases her with up-to-date taunts about getting text messages from Little Bo Peep. Since both director Jaume Collet-Serra and scriptwriter David Leslie Johnson make no bones about Esther’s bad side from the start, the story plays out on a predictable track for a while; when the scene cuts to a playground where both Esther and that classmate are frolicking, you count the minutes till the latter falls victim to an “accident.” There are moments when Esther seems too crafty to be believed, and others where the threat of violence toward the Coleman children (particularly one in which Esther levels a loaded pistol at little Max) are queasy rather than scary.
Slowly but surely, however, Orphan’s creators up the ante until it becomes clear they’re not letting any standards of good taste get in the way of delivering the thrills, cheap or otherwise. Throughout the opening acts, they drop in bits of black humor deriving from Esther’s inappropriately mature behavior, from her use of profanity (including a hilariously obscene threat directed at Daniel) to her insistence on snuggling with John during a thunderstorm (if you think that’s creepy, just wait…). As it becomes clear there are no limits to its little villain’s bad behavior, Orphan tightens the screws and cranks up the giggly tension, and part of the fun simply becomes watching to see how far the filmmakers will go. Pretty far, it turns out, and quite beyond the bounds of most mainstream horror, and even if it’s hard to take the movie seriously overall, it generates moments of genuine suspense in the final reels when it isn’t eliciting shocked laughter.
Helping keep everything on an even keel is lead actress Farmiga, who previously tangled with a rotten kid in Joshua and here commits to a straight-faced performance even when everything around her is going crazy. That maintains sympathy for Kate as Esther’s manipulations alienate her from the rest of her family and she desperately tries to uncover the truth about the new adoptee, and pays off in moments where she strikes back against Esther (which had the audience at a Fantasia screening cheering). Sarsgaard has a more functional role as the husband who (sometimes implausibly) can’t believe there’s anything wrong with the girl, but he plays it well, and Bennett and especially Engineer are quite empathetic, especially as it becomes clear that Orphan’s creators may not have any compunctions about bumping them off.
By the climax, the film falls back on familiar tropes—stalking scenes through a dark house, a desperate race to get home—but also incorporates a plot twist that would make William Castle smile with approval. That’s only appropriate, since this is a production of Dark Castle Entertainment, which takes its name from the veteran B-meister and whose output has been hit-and-miss, often within the same movie. Orphan is equally uneven, but the fact that the bulk of the good stuff takes place in its second half should leave most viewers feeling like they got their money’s worth. Do try to see it with a packed house, as it’s the kind of flick that truly benefits from shared audience response.
