This latest from the director of House of Wax starts with a doozy of a dream sequence: Kate (Vera Farmiga) has a nightmare about her recent miscarriage, in which she's hugely pregnant, starts gushing blood in the hospital, and has her child forcibly ripped from her womb by a sadistic nurse. It's gory, way over-the-top, and dances straight across the line of good taste. And pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the film.
In a better movie, that over-the-top attitude might not be a problem. Director Jaume Collet-Serra obviously wanted Orphan to be the sort of old-school horror romp that mixes giggle-inducing discomfort with jump-out-of-your-seat scares. Dumb plotting and even dumber dialogue are made all the worse by Collet-Serra's unimaginative direction, though, and adding pregnancy gore and threats to children to the stew just results in a ludicrous, often offensive, mess.
The story's your standard Creepy Kid Threatens Family scenario, with Kate and her architect husband, John (Peter Sarsgaard) adopting a Russian orphan named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) following the stillbirth of their third child. It doesn't take long to figure out that Esther's bad news -- heck, when Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder) tells Kate and John that Esther's previous adoptive family all died in a mysterious house fire, we know what's coming.
Sarsgaard, an excellent actor who usually shows up in far better fims than this, gets the short end of the stick here. As Kate and their two kids -- an adorable little girl named Max (Aranya Engineer) and her annoying brat of an older brother, Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) -- all start to figure out that Esther is bad news, John stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that there's a problem and he just comes off like an enormous jerk. Is this deliberate? Are we supposed to dislike him? The character's behavior and motivations are so sketchy, it's hard to tell.
John's jerkishness is just one of many layers of detail that have been shoved into Orphan in an attempt to give it some weight. Also crammed into the story -- the little girl, Max, is deaf, after almost drowning in the nearby pond. Kate feels guilt over the accident, because she was drunk at the time. John, it turns out, had an affair some 10 years earlier, and Kate still holds a grudge. Does any of this have anything at all to do with the creepy Russian girl who may kill them all? Nah, not really. It's just more stuff for the characters to talk about as Collet-Serra swoops his camera around the family's ridiculously massive, concrete-and-wood modern home, while setting up shot after shot of dark corners and bathroom-cabinet mirrors, making you think something's about to jump out at you, except that it doesn't.
What drives Orphan from simply unimaginative into bad-movie territory, though, is the film's deliberate attempt to shock by exploiting the audience's innate sense of decency. Children are repeatedly put not only in peril, but exposed to obscenely violent acts, and the film's "twist" ending follows a deeply uncomfortable scene in which Esther attempts to seduce John, playing off our natural revulsion for pedophilia for a cheap reaction. These are things that go beyond garden-variety horror lore, and start to feel genuinely offensive.
It's one thing to just not like a movie very much; when you leave the theater with a bad taste in your mouth, it's more like a violation. Orphan had the potential to be a good, creepy little horror flick -- heck, at worst it might have just been mediocre. But maybe, even in horror, there are lines that shouldn't be crossed, unless you want the audience to feel dirty afterwards.