Orphan (2009)
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
After losing their baby, a married couple adopt 9-year old Esther, who may not be as innocent as she seems.
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10 films that influenced Orphan
What critics say influenced Orphan
You know that the nightmare of a ghoulish forced abortion that opens the movie is a premonition of bad experiences with evil kids, but you're thinking The Omen or The Bad Seed – something in the devil cult or genetic malfunction line.
Has John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga) ever watched The Bad Seed, for heaven’s sakes?
When watching the new Orphan, it's hard not to think of earlier "evil children" movies like Alice Sweet Alice (1976), The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and Village of the Damned (1960 and 1995).
Before you can say “The Bad Seed just got badder,” she’s attacking her snotty classroom rival on the playground, casually crushing injured pigeons with bricks, and threatening to castrate her stepbrother with a carpet knife.
As well as treading in the demonically small footsteps of The Omen and The Ring, Spanish director Collet-Serra (who, let’s not forget, gave the world Paris Hilton’s secondmost downloaded oral video moment in 2005’s House Of Wax) also borrows from every distraught married couple/psycho-in-the-house thriller from The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Fatal Attraction to Don’t Look Now.
When watching the new Orphan, it's hard not to think of earlier "evil children" movies like Alice Sweet Alice (1976), The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and Village of the Damned (1960 and 1995).
As well as treading in the demonically small footsteps of The Omen and The Ring, Spanish director Collet-Serra (who, let’s not forget, gave the world Paris Hilton’s secondmost downloaded oral video moment in 2005’s House Of Wax) also borrows from every distraught married couple/psycho-in-the-house thriller from The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Fatal Attraction to Don’t Look Now.
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As well as treading in the demonically small footsteps of The Omen and The Ring, Spanish director Collet-Serra (who, let’s not forget, gave the world Paris Hilton’s secondmost downloaded oral video moment in 2005’s House Of Wax) also borrows from every distraught married couple/psycho-in-the-house thriller from The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Fatal Attraction to Don’t Look Now.
When watching the new Orphan, it's hard not to think of earlier "evil children" movies like Alice Sweet Alice (1976), The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and Village of the Damned (1960 and 1995).
When watching the new Orphan, it's hard not to think of earlier "evil children" movies like Alice Sweet Alice (1976), The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and Village of the Damned (1960 and 1995).
The best thing about Orphan, the bad kid-from-hell shocker from Spanish horror director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax) and producers Joel Silver and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the most talked-about movies of the summer so far for its chilling effect on the business of adoption, is the way it plays with the genre's overused staples and its sophisticated audience's expectations.
If director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax), screenwriter David Leslie Johnson , and their big-time co-producers, Joel Silver and Leonardo DiCaprio , have any qualms about explicitly showing a little girl slaughtering people or attempting to seduce a grown man or pointing a gun at the head of her six-year-old stepsister (the wonderful Aryana Engineer), they have clearly worked through them (as have, apparently, the young actors respective parents).
It's really to director Jaume Collet-Serra's ("House of Wax") that he's gotten such a strong performance out of Fuhrman and made her so convincing.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra redeems himself after his disastrous "House of Wax" with a genuinely scary movie ramped up by a truly inspired plot twist.
Jaume Collet-Serra ("House of Wax") directs this Evil Child Thriller, turning it into an idiotic anti-adoption movie that skates over thin ice in its silly but vicious story.
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Collet-Serra signals his intentions early, dressing beetle-browed Esther like those spooky twins from The Shining and having orphanage head Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder) roll her eyes when the recently bereaved Colemans decide to take her home.
There’s no getting round the fact that Sarsgaard’s John is a blinkered chump, but Farmiga heroically negotiates the plotholes to show the grit and range she was denied as DiCaprio’s wishy-washy shrink in Scorsese’s The Departed.