Film of the Week: Orphan

For the month of October, each week I will be covering a horror movie. Each movie, I will be going in blind, so when I sit down and watch it, it’ll be the first time ever. The first film, Orphan, isn’t a traditional horror movie in the sense that it strays away from the jump scares, the blood and the gore, but focuses on the atmosphere, and the mentality of the characters.

The Coleman family struggle to return to normalcy after they lost their third child before birth, and Kate, the mother, felt that the family was incomplete and so decided to adopt a child. It dealt with the mentality of the family considerately, and the family does pick up slightly after the inclusion of Esther, a girl from Russia. However, it doesn’t take long before things take a turn and dramatically fall downhill.

The atmosphere was established almost immediately; it’s definitely more a drama film than a horror, and for the most part I believed that was the reason why it was a good horror film. The set up was gradual original, with the characters developing naturally over the course of the first act before the horror truly started. After showing me what type of film it was, there was plenty of room for creativity, which would lead to many scares. There’s nothing supernatural at all, and that’s what I believed was the scary part about the film. It had high hopes of being a different but good horror movie. However, it was only but different and boring.

The down-to-earth atmosphere sets up the fact that there’s no supernatural elements involved whatsoever. There’s no scenario where we see the revelation that the adopted girl is only but a demon posing as said girl in order to choose the next family, and then move onto the next instead of the family choosing the little girl. It attempted to focus entirely on the real world and whilst the story was certainly original, the portrayal wasn’t necessarily predictable but was unfortunately unenjoyable therefore unexciting. The only reason why I kept watching was because I was intrigued about the mystery of the girl and to see if the family would make it out alive. Now that I know the answer, it’s certainly not a film I would want to watch again.

The film does feature a lot of child acting, sometimes in the most intense scenes working alongside the adults, but their performance is undoubtedly on par throughout.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)