Orphan (2009)

By Jim Hemphill

It’s hard to think of a recent American movie that’s as smart and ambitious as Orphan but has so little regard for its own audience’s intelligence. There’s a great horror film buried somewhere underneath the gimmicky sound design (in which the audio is either dead silent or pitched at the level of a Motorhead concert), false scares, and contrived plot twists, but clearly director Jaume Collet-Serra and writers David Leslie Johnson and Alex Mace don’t trust their viewers to appreciate it. They take a challenging, deeply unsettling meditation on the horrors of parenthood and marriage (among other things), and turn it into something so comforting and pat that it makes Ghosts of Girlfriends Past look like Taxi Driver.

Orphan tells the story of Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John (Peter Sarsgaard), a couple whose marriage has been plagued with problems: Kate’s alcoholism, John’s infidelity, and, most recently, a stillborn daughter. They decide to start fresh by adopting another child, and they think they’ve hit the jackpot when they find Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), a little girl who is uncommonly bright and talented for her age. Before long, however, Esther’s behavior becomes more and more erratic, and Kate becomes convinced that her new daughter means to cause her other kids—and herself—great harm. The problem is that the more she asserts her beliefs, the crazier she sounds to all the other adults around her, including her own husband.

The movie doesn’t get off to a promising start; Collet-Serra slathers cheap effects all over the story, conjuring up phony scares (most of which are accomplished by dropping the volume and then letting a loud Dolby-processed BOOM! erupt on the soundtrack) and a gory but pointless opening dream sequence. It’s as though the director is terrified that his audience will flee the theatre if they aren’t given some form of cinematic shock treatment every couple minutes (if he could rig the seats with electric buzzers like William Castle, I’m sure he would).

Yet after a clumsy opening, Orphan eventually finds its rhythm, thanks largely to two superb and subtle performances by Farmiga and Sarsgaard. As the film progresses, it moves beyond the subgenre of the “evil kid” movie and incorporates other influences; while it gets a lot of mileage out of creepy sequences reminiscent of The Omen, The Bad Seed, and The Good Son, it also recalls The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby, and other films in which heroines are dismissed as hysterical or paranoid when they try to speak the truth. The fault lines underneath the surface of Kate and John’s marriage grow more and more unstable as the tension mounts, allowing Orphan to ponder truly universal horrors, like the horror of discovering that the person you spend your life with doesn’t trust or support you, or the horror of realizing that you don’t know your own child at all. At its best, Orphan puts the viewer in the position of identifying with characters whose situations are resolvable only by drastic, difficult action—divorce and child abandonment at best, murder at worst.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers eventually lose faith in the very act of making a horror film based around— God forbid —actual ideas, and introduce a third-act plot twist that trivializes everything that precedes it. Rather than actually follow through on the implications of the troubling questions that the story initially raises, the writers opt for a “surprise” ending that causes the movie to spectacularly self-destruct. Without giving anything away, the ultimate revelation about Esther is a catastrophic compromise; it alters our perspective on everything we’ve seen in a way that makes what was uncomfortable safe, and what was morally ambiguous utterly simplistic. It also sets up a climax filled with hoary clichés that went stale somewhere around the time the third Friday the 13th movie was released—Farmiga is reduced to an anonymous screamer running through the woods, while Esther shows an indestructibility that would make Michael Meyers proud. To be fair, Collet-Serra stages the action competently and gets as much juice as he can out of the violence, but his skill—and that of Farmiga and the other actors—only makes the movie’s bankruptcy of imagination all the more depressing. People with real talent came up with this crap.

To jettison everything that’s original, provocative, and intelligent from the movie in favor of a run-of-the-mill slasher ending is cynicism of the worst sort; clearly the filmmakers are aiming for the rubes in the audience who won’t be satisfied without a third-act chase or dopey one-liners (when Farmiga used a Schwarzenegger-esque punch line to punctuate her final act of self-defense, my heart sank). From an artistic point of view this is indefensible, and from a commercial one it’s pretty dumb as well—anyone who thinks that audiences won’t sit still for adult, character-driven horror must not have been paying attention when The Haunting in Connecticut opened at #1 earlier this year. It’s too bad, because Orphan is filled with great ideas and great performances; in fact, the middle hour is so strong and taps into so many basic, primal fears that I’d recommend it in spite of all my reservations. That middle hour just makes the final letdown all the more disappointing, though. The big plot twist in the movie is surprising, but only because it’s impossible to believe the same people who came up with all the stuff that’s good in Orphan would resort to something so idiotic.

Rating: (2.5 out of 5):