Orphan

Yesterday I had some time to kill. I took a wander up to my local cinema to see what was playing. I just missed the start of the next session of Public Enemies but I noticed a movie called Orphan was playing.

“What’s it like?” I asked the cashier.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet because I just came out today.” He told me. Well it’d been too long since I got to see a horror movie so I decided to give it a try. The trailers, like any horror movie trailer, had made me hopeful. So I got my ticket, got my popcorn and I found my seat in the cinema.

If you don’t know what Orphan is about then that’s understandable. The trailers didn’t expose much about the film’s plot or even it’s premise and so all I knew to expect was a horror movie with something to do with orphans. Well that turns out to be pretty accurate. The film stars Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman and predictability makes a cameo as the film’s plot.

Kate (Farmiga) and John (Sarsgaard) Coleman are two parents who want a third child. Kate’s last pregnancy, the one that would have blessed them with a third child, was a still birth that drove her to alcoholism and still haunts her dreams. But now she hasn’t had a drink in a year and both her and her husband think it’s time to adopt a child. They visit an orphanage and, by chance, they find the perfect little girl. Esther (Fuhrman) is an artistic, talented, mature, well spoken little girl from russia who has already been adopted once but it ended in disaster. Fortunately, Kate and John find her and they know right away that she’s the perfect little girl. Or is she? As soon as Esther joins the family, things start to change. There’s sibling rivalry, school yard brawls, relationship problems and something about Esther just doesn’t seem right.

So in case you missed it: Esther is evil. That’s the premise we’re working on with this film. The direction by Jaume Collet-Serra, the cinematography by Jeff Cutter and the writing by Alex Mace & David Leslie Johnson all come together to create something utterly uninteresting to watch. I knew the film would be a disappointment when we got forty minutes into it and I started checking the time. Which brings me to this film’s biggest problem.

It’s boring and it drags on and on and on. The movie runs at around two hours but I could have sworn there was another hour hidden somewhere in there. The supposedly thrilling and scary scenes don’t add much because the movie teases you with the “false scare”. That’s the moment where the tense music plays, the character’s eyes widen, they look behind them and there’s nothing there! I’m not sure who invented this or why but if I wasn’t sick of it before, I’m definitely sick of it now. By the time it gets to something actually frightening happening, I’m too bored to care.

To be fair, the movie doesn’t fail in every respect. This movie doesn’t do so such a bad job at being creepy. A revelation about Esther’s artistic works is both creative and creepy when we first see it. As the film progresses, it builds on this idea and it only gets creepier. That may well be the film’s only triumph.

What I’d really like to say now is that Isabelle Fuhrman is a wonderful little actress who steals the show and she’s a promising young actress I hope to see more of in the future. I’d like to say it, but I can’t. The best thing about her performance is her accent. Otherwise, this movie makes a poor actor out of everyone who got involved. It’s as if the whole cast new they were in a bad movie and didn’t even bother trying. They took the money, did the job and moved on. All things considered, it probably wasn’t a bad choice.

The film’s climax eventually does come. When everything has gotten as bad as it’s going to get for the Coleman family, the movie shows us exactly what it wanted to be all along. Orphan didn’t want to be a thriller, it didn’t want to be a creative or original horror, it just wanted to be a 1980s stalker movie. This may have worked if it had done this right from the beginning, thirty years ago and it was called “Halloween” and not “Orphan”. But the movie doesn’t meet any of these requirements. The climax isn’t bad but after nearly two hours, I just didn’t care any more. Worst of all the climax, like the rest of the movie, drags on and is horribly predictable. Somehow I don’t think that’s the horror the movie was going for.

There aren’t many films I think of walking out in the middle of but this was one of them. The whole production is just dull. Except for the first scene, which is just weird. But it’s all downhill from there. The sad thing is that Orphan had potential to be a good movie. At times the film was creepy and the twist at the end is creative but poorly executed. When the big revelation comes, it just seems like it was a last minute addition to the script. Orphan is a film with it’s moments but ultimately it’s extremely dull. Consider my sacrifice, in watching the entire movie, a public service to you. There’s better uses for your money.

I don’t expect every movie to be brilliant but I expect every movie to try. Orphan chickens out before it even tries to be brilliant. Orphan just tries to be adequate and unfortunately, it fails at it. The movie reminded me a lot of ‘The Good Son’ but it makes all the same mistakes that movie made and then some.

So I give Orphan 1.5/5 burning tree houses.