Orphan: Your Kid Is Not Special

Every generation gets the evil-kid movie it deserves, with past
standouts such as The Bad Seed, The Exorcist, and David Cronenberg’s
The Brood all handily serving to exploit a parent’s worst fear while
simultaneously offering up a bit of subliminal reassurance. (So your
kid spilled Juicy Juice on the couch, you say? Call us when her head
starts swiveling all the way around.) Orphan may not be the defining
child horror film of its era (that honor still belongs to 2007’s
brilliantly subversive Joshua), but it carries a squicky, exploitative
charge that leaves most big-studio horror in the dust. Boasting a pair
of far-beyond-the-call performances by Peter Sarsgaard and Joshua vet
Vera Farmiga, it sets up a series of increasingly queasy taboo points
and then proceeds to rocket-cycle over them.

You’ve seen the trailer by now: Grieving from a recent loss, a pair
of casually upper-class folks adopt the mysterious, Russian-accented
Esther (Isabelle Furhman). It doesn’t really work out. Director Jaume
Collet-Serra, previously responsible for the
not-remotely-as-sucky-as-it-probably-should-have-been House of Wax revamp, handles things with a fair amount of aplomb, finding a balance
between creepy character-building downtime and some unusually ferocious
Dolbyfied money shots. (However, 123 minutes is still an awfully long
time for this sort of thing.)

Ruthlessly effective as it is, though, Orphan would likely slide
handily out of the short-term memory and into B-movie Cinemax limbo
were it not for the final act, which contains one of the most
hysterical, loopy, pure-D bugfuck plot developments in the history of
the genre. (Do yourself a favor and stay far away from IMDB until
catching a matinee.) Call it crass, call it ridiculous, but when a
movie can make an entire audience laugh and gag at the same time,
something’s cooking.