Orphan Movie Reviews

Every other child in the orphanage is playing. She is the only one who sits alone painting. That's when John Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard) walks into the room. He is impressed by her work and strikes up a conversation. Esther, the nine-year-old orphan (Isabelle Fuhrman), turns out to be mature, bright and well-mannered. Almost immediately, John and his wife Kate (Vera Farmiga) adopt her. Kate has a history of tragedy; she has lost her third baby in childbirth.

An evil adopted kid wreaking havoc in the lives of the adopted family is a done-to-death theme. But Jaume Collet-Sera (House of Wax) and screenwriter David Leslie Johnson treats Alex Mace's story with a freshness and ingenuity that is deliciously macabre and eerily gratifying. The tragic loss of their unborn child has Kate (Vera) and John (Sarsgaard) devastated, taking a toll on their marriage and Kate's fragile psyche.

The greatest accomplishment of horror films is the extent to which they fiddle your imagination. A slight nudge when accompanied with a thud in the background or a swish of the curtain in pin-drop silence could play havoc with the best of nerves. These are old tricks but far from redundant. And so it's not too hard to understand why filmmakers love to fashion a chiller thriller around an innocent, quite often, exotic-faced kid.