Orphan (2009)

directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

123 minutes

Canada, France, Germany, USA

3 stars out of 5

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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.