Bedevil (1993)

directed by Tracey Moffatt

Australia

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

A lot of sources name this as the first feature film directed an Aboriginal Australian woman, but I'm wary of claims like that. Is it really the first, or is it just the first to get any kind of wide recognition? Even if it is the case that this is truly the first, the reasoning for that shouldn't be framed as a supposed lack of Aboriginal filmmakers, but with a society that has for so long prevented Aboriginal people from making films. Relevant to my specific interests, Bedevil also purported to be a horror film, or at least a creepy, supernatural film. That claim, at least, I can validate.

The film is split up into three segments, each dealing with a piece of local lore as told by the people who witnessed whatever event is at the center of the story. The first two segments are presented in almost a mockumentary style, a mix of present-day interviews with the people in question and flashbacks to the event they're describing as it actually unfolded. But there's something about the way these two stories are told - and I am deliberately focusing on the first two, because the third was a bit more inscrutable, and I'll get to it in time - that is entirely unlike the way you would typically think of a documentary or found-footage style film as being. These aren't formal, sit-down interviews, they're patchy recollections told almost as an aside while the interviewees are doing something else. Barely "interviews" at all, really; that term may be too formal for what in essence feels like a friend or at least an acquaintance telling us something that happened to them. It's almost like the focus is not on the story itself but on the people who lived the story - not the specific people, not in a biographical sense, but in the sense that at the heart of every legend shown to us in Bedevil is a real person who eventually grew up, moved on, and continued to live their life.

In "Mr. Chuck", two people relate parts of the same story. The story centers on a swamp that was rumored to have been haunted by the ghost of an American GI who drowned in it during WWII. The swamp as a physical location is a meeting place between three cultures: the Aboriginal people who have lived with it for tens of thousands of years; the white Australians, hungry for progress, building on the swamp like it's any tract of vacant land; and, only in ghostly form (or maybe as something worse) the specter of the American presence on the island. One of the storytellers is an Aboriginal man who, as a boy, fell into the swamp and experienced being physically touched by the spirit inhabiting it. The other is a white woman, the child of one of the developers who built a movie theater right on top of the swamp. While the woman manages to tell her story in a detached, impersonal way, describing with no facial expression how everyone knew that the boy who fell into the swamp had a bad home life and everybody could have helped him, but they didn't, the man seems physically haunted by his experience. He laughs about it, almost hysterically, but the way his face is downturned sometimes makes it look like he's crying. There's something incredibly, incredibly haunting about this segment - that feeling of what was once a human having been subsumed by the land that did not want him and turned, over decades, into something else. Something worse. I also find it really compelling that what was built on top of the swamp was a movie theater - a place where people go to live and relive stories, some of them, eventually, probably, being war stories.

"Choo Choo Choo Choo", the second segment, partially covers the Min Min Lights, an interesting phenomenon that I've known about for a while, but also involves a more personal story about a phantom train and the ghost of a little girl accidentally killed on its tracks. This is by far the most intimate telling: no formal, sit-down interviews; just the woman who witnessed the ghost train giving us tidbits of information when she's not rocking out in the bed of a truck with her netball group or busy cooking a wild pig underground. We feel familiar with this woman - at one point she comes up to the camera and wipes off the lens, like we the viewers are a messy child who's come to her with chocolate on our face. Everyone in the immediate vicinity seems to know about the story of the train, as we see that the people living around the tracks have actually developed a gesture to reference it - pumping one arm for the chugging of the wheels, then covering their eyes to represent the ghost girl who is inexorably paired with the train. Again, there's something deeply haunting about this, about hearing but not seeing disembodied noises in the night, knowing something is there, but not being able to touch it. But in the present, the woman is not haunted by it. She tells us how irritating it was to have the ghost girl come around, and then she has a little spat over the correct plating of seafood with her friend in their native language. What she experienced is a part of her life that she's conveying to us, and she's at ease with it.

The third segment, "Lovin' the Spin I'm In", has no interviews whatsoever and is entirely dramatized. It's also my least favorite segment, although it is as well-made and interesting as the previous two. It's the story of a landlord who owns a building inhabited by two Torres Strait Islander tenants who've been dead for many years, and the perspective is mostly through the eyes of a 14-year-old white boy in the building across the street. I think maybe the self-reflective nature of the first two stories was what made them engaging to me, because I had trouble getting into this one that was a more conventional narrative. It is eerie, unusual, and memorable, with the same gorgeous cinematography as the rest of the film, but it felt less interesting overall.

To talk of cinematography: this movie doesn't look like anything else I've ever seen. Moffat was heavily influenced by the aesthetic of Kwaidan, and it really shows, but at the same time Bedevil is its own thing. The film itself is unfortunately woefully obscure and your best chance of finding it is a garbage VHS rip that strips a lot of the visual intricacy from it, but you can still tell how innovative and unique the set design is. At first I thought the use of painted backdrops and what looks like just a bunch of Astroturf and fake shrubbery on a soundstage was something we were meant to not really see, but now I think it was very deliberate, and a brilliant choice. The parts of the film set in the present are filmed in a space that's clearly real, lucid, but the events of the past take place in a liminal zone that feels like a dream. The painted sunset looks more perfect than a real sunset could ever be, because it's not a real sunset, it's the way a sunset is captured as a static moment in our memory. The past segments feel like reenactments. The stories being told exist in an un-visitable eternal single moment that lives on not as an empirical truth but as a bodily, lived experience held within the tellers.

I was really taken in by this beautiful and strange film. People do know about it within certain circles, but it seems pretty obscure in the overall picture of Australian cinema. I'm not familiar with Tracey Moffat's other work as a video artist, but Bedevil has definitely left an impression on me, and I want to explore the other things she's created.

The War in Space (1977)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

----

I really dropped the ball by not posting this review on May the 4th, but for some reason I was certain I'd already posted it. Anyway, here it is now, for your delectation.

I'm going to come right out and say that this is not my favorite Jun Fukuda film, nor my favorite sci-fi film from Toho in general, but that isn't a recommendation to avoid it, because even if it's a little lacking plotwise, it's still got some of the best practical effects around. I'm not going to talk much about the things I disliked here; instead I'm going to focus on the good things (of which there are many), because really there's not that much that's bad about this film so much as there is stuff that it just doesn't have, like for example any interesting characters.

The first act sees The War in Space at its most Jun Fukuda-y, by which I mean there's some spying and crime going on, and multiple people are either shot or at risk of getting shot. It's a little eerie for a while because the aliens can imitate humans, so we don't know what's going on or what the aliens' grand plan is, just that there's people who are not people and they could be anywhere. Most people know Fukuda from his Godzilla films, but I've seen more of his crime movies than most people would probably care to watch (though he is brilliant as a toku director, don't get me wrong) and as such I've slowly come to associate him more with the crime genre. You can definitely tell, if you're familiar with his work in that area, which parts of this film are most strongly under his influence. It stuck out to me that this movie on the whole is almost startlingly beige; Fukuda has worked in black-and-white, but I know him mostly as someone who tends towards a sort of vibrant, hyper, very colorful aesthetic, so to see The War in Space be so monotone and boring was a bit of a departure from usual.

Like I said, there is not much plot. All of Earth's major cities suddenly come under attack by unknown alien forces, large armadas of tiny little orbular ships raining laser fire down on all our landmarks. A last-minute transmission from a space station gives firsthand info, right before they're destroyed, that the enemy is some kind of "Roman ship". More on that later. The source of the invaders is eventually determined to be Venus, and only one thing is strong enough to make the journey there and fight the enemies - the Gōten, but it's not quite finished, and the race to get it up and ready as more and more of Earth's cities become ruins is thrilling. Except for some dragging in the middle, this is not a boring movie, despite whatever else it may be. The Gōten is launched in the nick of time, and for the remainder of the movie (a little over half) we will never go back to Earth; everything either takes place on the ship itself or on Venus.

I am a die-hard fan of the Gōten. I will not get into all of the reasons why at the moment, but since its earlier appearance in Atragon (also one of my favorite movies, which I get wildly enthusiastic when talking about and will refrain from expanding upon here) it became one of the most striking ships in tokusatsu as well as a personal favorite of me and many others. There is just something about its appearance that so perfectly encapsulates the future-thinking of Showa-era science fiction: This ship that takes pieces from existing vessels but combines them into something that is sea-, air-, space-, and ground-ready, an impossible dream of technology that is, even in the context of the technologically advanced future that spawned it, looked upon as a crowning achievement. There's something so iconic about that giant drill at its head. When it's used to tunnel through the ground I always feel childishly excited. I'm not a weapons dude, I've only recently started studying specific machinery in tokusatsu, but the Gōten is as beloved to me as some living characters are.

It's difficult to describe the breadth of the practical effects in this film in just a couple of paragraphs, and anyway it would probably be boring if I did. But just imagine that every mid-century fantasy about what Venus might be like is put to film here. Toho was already doing incredible things on soundstages and miniature sets in the 60s, and this represents what I feel is the height of their imagination made physical. Everything looks very convincing: Scenes where miniature ships traverse the miniature landscape of Venus actually look like the ship is navigating miles of terrain, when in reality it was feet or inches. Same goes for the sets when humans are walking around Venus, although despite all the other wacky stuff in this film I do find it difficult to believe that such dinky, flimsy spacesuits are enough to protect anyone from getting instantly crushed and boiled to death. This is like watching movies where people imagine what it would be like to walk around on the moon, before we actually did go to the moon, except we're probably not going to be landing people on Venus any time soon.

This is kind of a weird movie in that parts of it feel very cobbled-together. It doesn't feel like it has a cohesive aesthetic. It feels like the idea of going to Venus was the root of it all and then other stuff was added in, not necessarily with a specific look in mind, but just because aliens and whatnot were needed for the setting. But this cobbled-together feeling leads to some of my favorite non-recurring aliens in the Toho universe. This is an incredibly niche thing, but I love when aliens appropriate a Roman aesthetic (see also: Romulans), which is what the guys in The War in Space do, or at least presumably they do; we don't see much of them beyond their ruler and a couple of mooks in a mostly empty palace. I find something really weirdly compelling about the idea of a civilization replicating the height of Roman society in parallel, millions or billions of miles away on another planet. I love the idea that Rome developed twice, that Rome is a common element in the universe, or even something that galactic civilizations might default to as a base template. It's just funny to me and also interesting. Another thing I love is the image of a ship flying through space that is an actual, physical ship, like a wooden sailing ship, and we get to see one of those face off against the Gōten, so that makes me pretty pleased. The scant bits of the Galactic Empire that we do see hint at a complex aesthetic tradition that I was dying to know more about. (Commander Hell is also played by Goro Mutsumi, who recently passed away and who I always love to see in stuff.)

Overall, this is mostly an ideas movie, I think. It follows a pretty standard "invaders attacking > invaders are routed out > invaders are destroyed" progression. The Gõten is treated as a superweapon that should not be used again (or at least the planet-killer bomb on its drill-tip is), which gives the plot a little more weight, but this doesn't come into play until the very end. It's not the best movie, but it contains some as-usual stunning practical effects, and I do heartily recommend it to fans of older science fiction.

A Ghost of a Chance (2011)

directed by Koki Mitani

Japan

142 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

I watched this as part of a project I'm doing where I use a list randomizer to generate a random movie from my worryingly long watchlist and then I watch it, no matter what it is. A Ghost of a Chance had been sitting on there for a while despite having a fun, quirky premise, most likely because it's just shy of two and a half hours long, and who has time for that. But I'm thankful to whatever algorithm is behind list randomization for picking this, because I really loved it. If nothing else, it is worth watching just for Hiroshi Abe tap-dancing.

Eri Fukatsu (lately of the smash hit Suzume, but she also has a lot of other credits, including the adaptation of Parasyte) plays a sort of not very good lawyer named Emi. She's just a little uncoordinated and seems new to the game, but hers is the kind of profession where you need to be taken seriously, and she decidedly is not. She takes on a case where her client is accused of murdering his wife, and his alibi is that at the time he was staying at a remote inn in the mountains, and could not possibly have been responsible for the murder as he was getting sat on by a ghost while it was occurring. Yeah, right. The prosecution jokes that the only way that alibi would fly is if Emi could get the ghost to come to court and give testimony.

So she does that.

I'm not sure what exactly she was looking for when she retraced her client's steps to the inn, because at this early point in the movie she was as dismissive of the existence of ghosts as anybody. The whole thing was a last-ditch endeavor to save a client who had little chance of a fair shot and, in the process, save Emi's downsliding career. Although the innkeeper is at first reticent, Emi ends up staying in the same room as her client, and as soon as she falls asleep she is confronted with the reality that her client was telling the truth: The inn is haunted by the ghost of a general from the Sengoku period, who sits on her and immobilizes her in exactly the same way he did to her client according to his alibi.

I have not personally seen the popular TV series Ghosts, but I'm going to use it as a way to try to get people to watch A Ghost of a Chance, because I feel like if you like that, you'd like this. The ghost and the mechanics behind his existence as a ghost are the funnest part of this movie. Rokubei seems like a chill guy. The samurai stuff was four-hundred-aught years ago. Nowadays he just wants to hang out and smell some cheeseburgers. He knows he's dead, and he knows that only certain people can see him, which is unfortunate for Emi's hope of getting him in front of a judge to give testimony, but will come into play later. He's fairly up-to-date on world events because the inn has a television, and furthermore he can actually leave his inn, but he has to, like, take a taxi or whatever, he doesn't exactly have superpowers. The real joy of this film comes from watching all the other actors play off of a character who is not supposed to be visible: This is a classic bit, and it absolutely is still entertaining to watch everybody thoroughly ignore an actor who you, as the viewer, know in real life is just somebody standing there. I appreciated that they didn't CGI Rokubei into being ethereal and have gags where people stick their hand through him or something like that. It's harder for the actors, but much more satisfying to watch.

I was going to say something about how sometimes a gimmick can carry an entire film, but after watching this for a while, it really doesn't feel like a gimmick, it's more of just... an idea. There's an introductory period where we're being shown, as I said, the mechanics of ghosthood in Rokubei's specific situation. This is where we get all the funny stuff like Emi looking crazy to outsiders for apparently conversing with nobody, and Rokubei occasionally scaring the living daylights out of random passersby who can see him (again, only a select few). After that, the movie proceeds apace. It continues on, plot having been established, and really gets into how exactly getting a testimony from somebody who doesn't have a physical body - and getting the living to believe that testimony - would work. They do some "ghost hunting 101" stuff to prove Rokubei's existence to the jury, like taking stereotypical blurry ghost photos of him and at one point coating him in magnetic sand so people can see his silhouette, and eventually settle on providing him with a harmonica that he can blow into for "yes" and "no" answers. The judge is surprisingly amenable to this, but in fairness they do go to fairly extreme lengths to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his court is, in fact, temporarily haunted. At one point Emi's boss even dies. ("This is not good", his ghost says.)

We the viewers know from the beginning that the client is not guilty, because we saw the people who really murdered his wife, and he wasn't one of them. But the film deftly keeps the specifics of it out of our sight until the final act. It isn't all just ghost stuff - Emi does still have a case to win. Various monkey wrenches keep getting thrown in the legal works, with maybe the most interesting of them being that the prosecution can fully see Rokubei, but is just pretending he can't, because it makes more sense to dismiss your opponent as obviously playing some kind of prank rather than validate her and risk losing the case, not to mention establishing a paradigm-shifting legal precedent. This is why the movie is two and a half hours long: It needs all that space to prove it's not just a one-trick pony.

Toshiyuki Nishida - who has also had the honor of being Kosuke Kindaichi at least once - plays Rokubei so perfectly I can't imagine anybody else in the role, but Fukatsu also plays Emi with an understated skill that I'd be remiss not to mention. Hers is an interesting character, because she's earnest but lacks self-confidence and real-world experience. I think it's a little difficult to act like somebody who is as genuine but also as un-self-aware as Emi is. And you really get a sense of her growth as a businesswoman from the start of the film to where she ends up - seeing her confidently slam-dunk the case at the end of the film is immensely satisfying. Her relationship with Rokubei changes subtly throughout the film as well: He starts off rather bluntly calling her "onna" (woman) and ends up calling her "hime" (princess), despite her protests.

I watch a lot of samurai stuff, so this whole idea tickled me. There's also something really funny about Toho, purveyors of arguably some of the best samurai films ever made, making fun of themselves a little in something like A Ghost of a Chance. Personally, I really enjoyed this. I thought it was well-rounded and never felt like it was using its unusual premise as a crutch. There's so much more to it than just what I've described in this review, and I'd love for others to check it out.

Salyut-7 (2017)

directed by Klim Shipenko

Russia

106 minutes

3 stars out of 5

----

I watched this for Yuri's Night/Cosmonautics Day. Usually my picks for the occasion tend to lean more towards the imaginative, science-fiction side of things, but I think this was a good choice since it's basically nothing if not a spotlight on cosmonaut heroics, and there are portraits of Yuri Gagarin in the background here and there, as any good Russian space film that knows its history will have. This is definitely one of those movies that feels like it's a very conscious of being A Movie™, a feeling which is difficult for me to describe but entails a sense - more intrusive than usual - that everything you're seeing is embellished to perfection and choreographed for maximum entertainment value. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because we all like to be entertained, and Salyut-7 absolutely achieves that factor, but it loses a little relatability in the process.

This is a movie that's based on real events, but is highly fictionalized outside of the basic fact that a rescue mission to the drifting, uncontrolled Salyut-7 craft really did occur. You can of course find all of this on Wikipedia, but in short, the Salyut-7 space station experienced a malfunction in an electrical sensor that determined when batteries needed charging, leading to it losing power, going wildly off-course, and becoming uncontrollable from the ground. There were no people in the station at the time, but the way things were going, it would eventually crash somewhere on Earth, and without power no one had any control over where that would be. Two pilots, Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh, were sent up on a ridiculously difficult mission to dock with Salyut-7 and bring it back under control. Wikipedia's article is fairly terse on this subject, but they did, amazingly, manage to dock with an out-of-control, freely rotating object, apparently using handheld laser rangefinders, get inside, and conduct the repairs needed to bring the station out of its frozen state and back to something a little more manageable. Ironically, the station did eventually end up undergoing an uncontrolled reentry in 1991, and crashed somewhere in Argentina.

Dzhanibekov and Savinykh are our two protagonists, with Dzhanibekov arguably being the main focus. At the beginning of the film, he's banned from further missions after an incident during a different emergency in space where he sees something inexplicable, claiming that "angels" visited him during a spacewalk. This is really fascinating because it bookends the film. Both him and Savinykh experience the same phenomenon during their isolation together while repairing the Salyut-7. Such a small thing actually ended up being possibly my favorite detail of this film, because I love the way the film just allows this event to let lie, doesn't explain it, just gives room to this impossible, supernatural event as a way of letting a sense of the miraculous remain in a story set against the rational, reactionary backdrop of the Cold War. The bureaucrats try to manage Dzhanibekov's experience, try to suggest factors that contributed to his seeing something that wasn't there, but the beauty and mystery of space refuses to be explained away.

This looks, on the surface, very much like one of those movies of a kind that you've certainly seen before where the achievements of one or two people are valorized above a greater whole. Most of the time I have no stomach for this viewpoint, because it ignores the fact that singular heroes almost always have a pool of other people surrounding them during their time of heroic deeds. But this time I feel like the portrayal was mostly fair. The team back on Earth, calculating exactly what it'll take to dock with the rogue station, guiding the cosmonauts, and contributing math and ideas to the effort, is incredibly important here. At the end of the day, it's true that there were only two people in that ship, that they had support and training from back home, but there were two sets of hands alone that accomplished the actual mechanics of docking with the station. But it's also true that they couldn't have done any of it without mission control. Both cosmonauts are still alive, with obscene amounts of medals and awards and both with planets named after them. Dzhanibekov went on to go into politics, photography, and, uh, attempting to circumnavigate the globe by balloon, apparently, and is now only 80 - I know, "only" 80, but when you watch movies like this for some reason you always imagine the people in them to either be dead or like a hundred years old.

Most of Salyut-7's appeal is visual. All of the CGI used to accomplish what would be a pretty dead movie without it is more than up to snuff. If nothing else about it grabs you, the sheer power of the EVA scenes will grab you. I don't think there's anybody out there who has seen a movie involving a spacewalk scene and not gotten sweaty palms - it's that feeling of being totally unmoored, attached only by the thinnest of tethers to a huge object that is itself floating through space controlled partly by you and partly by what people thousands of miles away are telling you to do. It's horrifying, and when the cosmonauts are cast against the looming Earth or the rising sun, it's also horrifyingly beautiful. You can't have a good space movie without that sense of terror and beauty, and Salyut-7 is up to the task, cinematography-wise. There's one scene that's going to stick with me, of the fire in the ship that leaves Savinykh injured: Dzhanibekov watching from outside, helpless, as his friend is trapped in what rapidly becomes a corked bottle full of fire. This is one out of many fictionalized aspects of the film; there was no such fire onboard the ship, and a lot of what happens to make the repair and return of the cosmonauts seem nearly impossible was just invented wholecloth. But man, watching it makes you feel. All in all I don't have much of a problem with the invented details because you can look all this up and find out easily what really happened - I see this movie as kind of a metaphor for heroics more than a record of real things, a way of saying how difficult the repair mission was and telling its story in a more sensational way.

So this is a fun movie that you probably shouldn't watch if you'd rather watch a space documentary because it doesn't have all its facts straight (on purpose). It's a movie - it makes stuff up so that you'll have a good time watching it. My favorite part of the film is when the two main characters are discussing why it is that cosmonauts, despite being such manly men, always seem to have daughters, and they both conclude that it's because girls are cool.

Orphan (2009)

directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

123 minutes

Canada, France, Germany, USA

3 stars out of 5

----

This movie came out right around the time I started to be allowed to see movies other than Disney or Pixar stuff as a kid, and so I was peripherally aware of it as something that was also playing in many theaters that my family went to. It was one of those movies that seemed to be known mostly for its twist, and not necessarily in a good way; the reception was a mixture of making jokes about it and... well, making other jokes about it. Nobody really seemed to be taking it seriously and I had no idea up until recently whether or not it was actually a good movie. The sequel that came out not too long ago had me intrigued, so I decided to finally watch the first one and find out what its deal was.

Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play a married couple whose lives hit a stumbling block after the stillbirth of their third child and the wife, Kate, going through recovery from alcoholism. An accident is also implied to have happened in the past involving their younger child that is blamed on Kate's alcohol abuse, but this is not really relevant to the plot at large. We see the two of them go through the process of trying to adopt a child until eventually they find Esther, a girl (supposedly) from a Russian orphanage whose parents died in a house fire, and are immediately smitten - she seems perfect; this reserved, quiet little girl who likes to paint and wear old-fashioned, pretty dresses. We the viewers, of course, know what's going on, and even if we somehow have managed to avoid being spoiled and don't know exactly what's going on, the tagline "There's something wrong with Esther" gives us a big hint that all is not as it seems.

Watching this with knowledge of the twist allowed me, for a minute, to elide over the fact that the whole backbone of this movie is kind of based in ableism. I won't go on about it too long, but when you watch this knowing that there is actually something wrong with Esther beyond the generic disturbed-child horror tropes, you're a little blind to the fact that in many ways this is a movie where our fear of the kid in question relies on behaviors that autistic kids tend to exhibit (dressing oddly, having unusual speech patterns, behaving differently from other children their age, not fitting in at school, etc). A lot of us are thankfully not phobic or bigoted enough to see it, but when, say, a horror movie contains a character who has autistic-coded behavior, but is made out to be a murderer or otherwise a criminal for reasons separate from their apparent autism, the end message is not "they wrote this person to be so obviously evil for other reasons that their evilness has nothing to do with their autism". The end message is that non-autistic people are afraid that autistic people secretly ARE that devious and dangerous. There's a subset of people who are frightened that kids who act differently like Esther will also end up being like Esther in the way that they abuse and harm other people.

I dismount my soapbox. The first thing I noticed about this movie is that it's ugly in that way that horror was throughout the first decade of the 2000s; that Saw-Hostel-Midnight Meat Train-House of Wax style where nobody wears any colored clothing at all and everything seems to be coated in ash and dirty snow. It's very industrial, stripped-down; there seems to be a rejection of the idea of cinematography in favor of presenting an atmosphere that communicates through blunt force that life is harsh. This aesthetic is not as severe as it is in other movies I can think of, and it's not distracting, but it's just kind of something where I thought "oh look, it's that mid-to-late-2000s drabness" and moved on.

Without a doubt the thing that makes this a watchable movie at all is Isabelle Fuhrman's performance as Esther. When you're a kid, you always feel older and more mature than you really are, and then when you do get older, you realize you had no idea what it was actually like to be an adult. Children on film, when they're in roles that require them, for whatever reason, to act more maturely than kids their age usually do, end up like the peripheral child characters in Orphan: annoying, not even through any fault of their own but because mean, vindictive lines such as those given to Esther's bullying classmate sound contrived and cringe-worthy when written by an adult to be spoken through the mouth of a child. It's too easy to become aware of the artifice when we're watching movies with children acting out scenarios written by adults trying to imitate what children are actually like. Absolutely none of that applies to Esther. At no moment whatsoever does she feel like a little girl, even - and especially - when she's pretending to be one. Furhman was 10 at the time, and everything about her line delivery and body language just says "tiny adult", not "child pretending to be an adult". It's really, really impressive for a child to be able to deliver a performance that breaks through that feeling of separation between adults and children and have adult viewers (or at least this adult viewer) feeling like they're looking at somebody their own age, even when they're not. Isabelle Fuhrman rules and it's so awesome that they got her back for the sequel. I don't think anybody else could have handled "child pretending to be an adult pretending to be a child" as well as she does here.

I should mention that Vera Farmiga also does a great job in her role and further saves this film by not matching her husband in typical horror movie parent obliviousness. Her character seems to have a depth and interiority that Sarsgaard's character does not. It's interesting to me that we never see her stillbirth presented in a realistic manner but instead our only view of it is as a horrific, trauma-warped memory that opens the film and is never shown again. Having that be our only window into what happened to her centers the film around her point of view rather than looking at her entirely as an outsider.

The pacing is fairly decent - I don't believe movies need a "reason" for their length, but I admit that the fact that this movie is over two hours long had me wondering about it a bit. I generally trust Jaume Collet-Serra as a director and aside from the color palette (which was really just how a ton of media looked at the time) I think this is a perfectly competent film. Despite everything going for it, though, this feels like a three-star movie at best. It's mid. It's maybe the most mid a movie has ever been. And it's so weird for a horror movie - in my brain I don't even necessarily categorize it as one, but I don't categorize it as not one either. It's just kind of, there's horror, and then there's Orphan. The scenario is horrific, yes, and the film uses horror tropes, but it mostly does its own thing in its own inscrutable, grungey, late-2000s way. It kind of falls apart if you start thinking about it even a little bit in that way that tabloid headlines do; it's meant to be entertaining and make you go "wouldn't it be horrible if..." but not explore that concept too deeply.