Review: Orphan

The suspense generated from Esther’s early lunatic behavior is of a mild, amusing variety.

Orphan
Photo: Warner Bros.

Vera Farmiga apparently has a festish for being scared shitless by creepy kiddies. How else to explain that, two years removed from starring in George Ratliff’s Joshua, she’s now headlining Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, a distaff version of The Good Son and its myriad ilk in which her character, Kate, still reeling from a third child’s stillborn death, adopts a precocious Russian girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman). “There’s something wrong with Esther,” claims the tagline, as if one couldn’t tell just from looking at her, as the nine-year-old—outfitted in antiquated dresses and ribbons that you mustn’t take off—is the type of prim-and-proper angel whose dead eyes flash malevolent glares behind smitten adults’ backs and who, it turns out, has a habit of always being in the vicinity of tragedies.

Esther is welcomed into the home of Kate and her husband, John (Peter Sarsgaard), and to the disgust of their son, Daniel (Jimmy Bennett), and the delight of their deaf daughter, Max (Aryana Engineer), who’s soon turned into an accomplice to murder by Esther and forced, via menacing threats, to keep her trap shut about what her new big sister is up to. What that precisely is remains shrouded in secrecy for much of the film’s 123-minute running time, though as is blatantly obvious, it’s somehow related to her insane precociousness (the girl can bang out a Tchaikovsky symphony like a pro) and fondness for Daddy.

Despite Collet-Serra’s apt use of running children’s laughter for jolt scares, the suspense generated from Esther’s early lunatic behavior is of a mild, amusing variety. Worse still, it isn’t sustained by a narrative that’s full of holes (since when do parents not fully investigate their adopted kids’ backgrounds?), and wraps up in ways both preposterous and devoid of import. Orphan spends considerable time establishing Kate’s grief over her miscarriage, guilt over the drunken neglect that cost Max her hearing, and marital tensions with Daniel, yet unlike Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, it never effectively casts its horrors as expressions of parental anxieties.

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Esther’s craziness isn’t in any way related to Kate’s child-rearing fears, with the root cause of the girl’s hammer-wielding madness ultimately posited as an Electra complex issue that’s distinct from her new mother’s personal hang-ups. Consequently, the proceedings wind up being just a lightweight don’t-trust-foreign-kids fable further undercut by the absence of remotely effective scares. Fuhrman has the evil eye down pat, and Farmiga brings more depth and soul to her role than is warranted by David Johnson’s cliché-ridden screenplay. Yet after once again being driven mad by a deranged tyke in her home, it’s likely best that the actress takes to heart her character’s opinion that “I have to stop being like this.”

Score: 
 Cast: Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman, CCH Pounder, Jimmy Bennett, Margo Martindale, Karel Roden, Aryana Engineer  Director: Jaume Collet-Serra  Screenwriter: David Johnson  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 123 min  Rating: R  Year: 2009  Buy: Video

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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