Murderous adopted daughters are scary, the fractured psyche of a mother is scarier.

Rating: Null/10 (25 October 2009)

I wanted to like this more and parts of it I did, those parts that seem to have by accident escaped from a different more intelligent sort of movie, one that doesn't fill its inspirational gaps with contrivance and the usual clichés we've seen in a thousand similar movies, but the movie constantly urged me to treat it worse than it may have deserved by sucking out almost any trace of psychological ambiguity from the get go and filling those gaps with the same old slasherish hijinks. By the end the movie can no longer support itself. It needs the jolt of two twists to keep it from going into cardiac arrest.
And then it does just that, by going off in the ice to have a prolonged knife fight whose outcome is rendered irrelevant by the same plot point it's called to replace. For Kate to be killed by her adopted daughter is a much lighter fate than to be estranged by her own family, locked up in a rehab clinic, knowing Esther lives under the same roof with her children. It's Kate's predicament the most intriguing thing in the movie for me. When her son goes into cardiac arrest and she comes out of the hospital room and slaps Esther in the face, forcing the nurses to subdue her while her husband leads Esther to safety, there's a fundamental break in communication there that I find the most horrifying. What if Esther was completely innocent and she projected her own guilt to her? Of course we know she's not, because the movie has painted Esther the "VILLAIN!!" from the get go for the benefit of an audience that shouldn't be challenged by modern horror films exactly because "hey, it's only a horror film". So everything is very literal here which immediately makes for a lesser movie.
And there lies Orphan's failure: it never allows for that frightening glimpse into a psyche fractured by trauma to gestate and mature. Because it never breaks free from literal horror to peer behind the veil. Like its cheap jump scares, Orphan's shock twists last only for a second. Plot must be pushed on after that. "So, she didn't come from an orphanage at all, what's next?". Orphan then falters not because it presents the frightening trauma of losing a child (even an unborn one) and then relegates it in the background and constantly tip-toes around it but because it fails to realize what's the scariest thing here. In the end Kate saves her daughter and all is well. But what if the loss of her unborn child broke something in her that can't be made right again? The director ought to have taken a very good look at Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now before he made this.