There hasn’t been a lot of scary this summer. Late summer and early fall are rife with H2, The Final Destination, Sorority Row, Jennifer’s Body et al, but I haven’t seen a horror movie in a theater since the insipid Last House on the Left remake that made me want to punch people. Which meant that Orphan was like a cool drink of water at the end of a long, parching day.
Fetid, brackish water teeming with illness and decay.
Orphan is not a very good movie.
Much of Orphan’s run time is spent making you wonder exactly what kind of movie you’re watching. Creepy little Esther is a walking anachronism with ominous ribbons around her throat and wrists. Is she a ghost? Is she a Bad Seed kid, just wholly and unrepentantly malevolent? The movie starts to play with the idea of the latter, but it’s a red herring, and the former never has much purchase beyond the ad campaigns that are supposed to leave you guessing about what’s going on.
Esther is neither of these things, incidentally. And the reveal is not shocking, except in its stupidity.
Orphan, for all of the creepy ambience it evokes, is also not very scary. Instead, the movie focuses on Vera Farmiga’s turbulent marriage with special attention paid to blame-shifting and arguing. Her alcoholism is a convenient prop to plausibly allow other characters to call her accusations into question even when common sense dictates that they should not – which serves to draw the film out unnecessarily to a length that feels like six to seven years.
In addition to being a psychodrama about the dissolution of an affluent family, Orphan is also maybe a comedy. Children committing acts of violence can be chilling when executed properly, but you will never laugh at little girls murdering and threatening people quite as hard as you will when you watch Orphan. I cannot believe that is the intended effect of the film.
The only reason to ever feel like something bad is happening in Orphan is listening to the overwrought score and falling prey to the rookie horror director’s toolbox of ‘scary’ shots and angles. They are the sole source of tension, and they are excessively ham-handed.
In a summer that I’ve defined by the movies I haven’t seen more than the ones I have, I wish I could say that Orphan was one of the former. Dark Castle, which launched a decade ago with a pair of promising William Castle remakes (and the first ten or so awesome minutes of Ghost Ship, hasn’t managed to do anything of quality since. Orphan is their nadir, being substantially less good than Feardotcom. I cannot say that it was worse than Last House, though, because I didn’t leave the film full of violent urges.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
She’s not a little girl; she’s a dwarf.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
A dwarf!?! Really!?! A Dwarf!?!
That was the only thing that I wanted to find out about the movie and I knew the reveal would be stupid. I just never thought it would be that stupid.
So, what’s the deal with the chokers?
The ribbons cover up scars that she has from when she was in a mental hospital and had to be forcibly restrained.
A lot of horror movies tend to suck, no one should know this better then you, Jeff.
I stopped looking for scary films, only really found one, and started looking for entertaining ones.
Silent Hill, despite its nerd-rage inspiring changes, was a fun film.
Event Horizon and the Hellraiser series (yeah I know, same movies) are my favorite ‘horror movie’ despite the fact they aren’t really scary.
A lot of horror movies rely on hamfisted, hackeyed cockamamie bullshit these days.
But then again, so do most movies these days.
Ah! Of course.