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EVIL KIDS NEED LOVE. TOO
ORPHAN (R) I have grown tired of evil kid
movies. The Bad Seed was long, slow, but
iconic. The Village of the Damned kids were
just damn creepy. The Omen (the first one)
was silly occult fun. The Good Son was only
remotely entertaining because the bad son
was the cute kid from Home Alone. J-horror
and its Hollywood importers made a mint off
stringy-haired scaries in The Ring, The Grudge,
etc. The Omen remake was so like the first '
it made itself utterly *
unnecessary. Joshua
bored me to death, which
is still kind of evil.
So, along comes
Orphan, an above-
average horror flick in
the children-who-kill
subgenre. The currently,
amusingly named par
enting duo, John and
Kate (Peter Sarsgaard
and Vera Farmiga), wish
to adopt. Like all horror movie couples, their
marriage is on the brink; tensions remaining
from a stillborn child, Kate's alcoholism and
an almost deadly accident involving their deaf
youngest, Max (Aryana Engineer), have the
two homebound professionals expressing their
love through gritted teeth.
Obviously, if you're having marital prob
lems, you should adopt a child, and that
magic potion is just what the misguided
Colemans swill. After a single visit to an
orphanage, John and Kate decide to take
home Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), a 19th-cen
tury Russian orphan with ribbons tied around
her neck and wrists.
Everything's hunky-dory until the troubled
child goes nuts—killing, maiming, manipu
lating, she does it all. Meanwhile, John and
Kate's marriage disintegrates even more due
to the added stress of another child. Suddenly,
Kate begins to wonder, "What's Esther's deal?"
Esther's deal, my
friends, is one of the
best twists in the itch-
ily incessant rash of
twist endings audiences
continue to scratch. The
revelation in Orphan
actually redeems the
movie, turning this imi
tative flick into some
thing half-way original.
More deliberate,
European, psychologi
cal horror than aggressive, Hollywood slasher
pic, Orphan entertains for two solid hours.
In the hands of a director defter than Jaume
Collet-Sera (House of Wax), this scary movie
might have been somebody. Rather, he allows
an unintelligible, unnecessary second climax
incongruous with the rest of the film, if not
the genre. Nevertheless, think about adopting
Orphan, if only for an afternoon matinee.
$
Drew Wheeler
Isabelle Fuhrman
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