Review of Orphan (2009) by Chads. — 23 Jul 2009

Is it a gratuitous scare, or not a gratuitous scare: at the outset of "Orphan", where that venerable horror cliche, the menace in the medicine cabinet mirror who, during the cabinet's brief interim of non-use, materializes seemingly from thin air, when the looker reunites with the looking glass, and sees four eyes instead of two? We're pretty sure that John Coleman(Peter Saarsgard) isn't an axe murderer, but "Orphan" suggests a malicious side to the father of three, by his sudden appearance in the bathroom alongside Kate Coleman(Vera Farmiga).

Esther(Isabelle Fuhrman) is still at the orphanage, and yet the horror tropes start without her. Why? In another scene, booming sounds, indicative of a haunted house, turns out to be Kate's hearing impaired daughter throwing a ball against the garage wall.

Is Max(Aryana Engineer) trying to tell the piano player something, possibly something about daddy? When Esther joins the family, there's a sharp increase in alarming incidents, yet the patriarch sees no correlation between the girl's arrival with the, in short order: playground mishap, the murder, AND the fire(a possible reference to Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice").

His painfully slow realization to Esther's true nature is a fixture of the "a-stranger-is-in-our-midst" horror/thriller subgenre, but "Orphan" provides a psychological rationale to his seeming obtuseness.

It's no accident that there's thin ice(a frozen pond) outside their house. Like Tarkovsky, the filmmaker uses water as a metaphor. "Orphan" goes in a wildly unexpected direction that does more than update Mervyn LeRoy's "The Bad Seed"(based on the novel by William March), it suggests "Lolita" written by Neil Jordan circa 1992, which would explain why John's allegiance to Esther remains strong beyond all reason.