Orphan

TedFlicks Rating:

$10 ticket on a scale of $0 to $12.

Somewhere between treatment and final cut, “Orphan,” which started out as a horror flick, morphed into an accidental comedy. It’s just not very scary. The first laugh comes in the opening reel, when Kate (Vera Farmiga) is brought to hospital in labor only to deliver a corpse with the help of a crazed O.R. staff. It’s a dream, and the cut to Kate awakening from it is pic’s first laugh. But it is based on the stillbirth of her third child, and it sets up the plot.

When Kate and husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) set out to adopt in pic’s only brightly lit scene, they encounter Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), an overdressed, talented, Russian orphan with an excellent command of English. Set apart from other girls in the orphanage, Esther just has to be the bad seed. David Leslie Johnson’s screenplay does not disappoint. Within weeks, John & Kate (plus two, not eight) take her home. Then bad things start to happen. Said bad things are foreshadowed by lugubrious lighting, odd camera angles, an eerie soundtrack, and characters in a constant, high strung state, startled by the slightest noise. Give helmer Jaume Collet-Serra credit for never missing a chance to hammer home a point that could better have been hinted.

Esther plays divide and conquer in her new home. She dredges up every bit of family backstory to split John from Kate, including his philandering and her alcoholism (Kate has been dry for a year). She soon terrorizes their natural children Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) and Max (Aryana Engineer) into joining her team. Things get bloody. Orphanage honcho Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder) is murdered by carpenter’s hammer after Esther throws young Max into the snowy street in front of her moving car. It snows a lot in “Orphan.” It’s amazing that it fails to pile up. By pic’s end it should be up to the rooftops. More murders, attempted murders, self-mutilation, and arson ensue as Esther tries to 86 Kate in order to seduce her new “daddy.” By the time Kate voices her suspicions of Esther, the latter has so turned her into a pariah that no one believes her, not even her shrink (Margo Martindale).

Plot turns on information from a nut-house in Estonia that Esther is not a nine-year-old orphan but a dangerous adult psychopath and serial killer who looks like a kid due to dwarfism. Kate, spurred to action, jumps out of a hospital bed and races home by car through snow covered roads in a lesson about the dangers of talking on hand-held cell phones while driving. Final reel is full of blood and gore. Victims are not just stabbed. They’re hacked to pieces. Every time Esther is down for the count, she pops up again like Glenn Close in the bathtub scene of “Fatal Attraction.” It’s almost too funny for words, but what can one expect from the director of that horrific Paris Hilton vehicle, “House of Wax”?

Fuhrman effectively conveys menace, but many of her readings are so straight that they come off as punchlines. Maybe it’s the east European accent. Martindale and Pounder are both competent in their relatively small roles, and Farmiga turns in a better than workmanlike job. But the real scene stealer is little Aryana Engineer. Child has the face of an angel which director of photography Jeff Cutter puts to excellent use in close-ups. Engineer’s character is deaf. So is Engineer. Her proficiency with sign language is central to plot. Rest of cast is adequate at best.

Payoff, when it finally arrives after 123 minutes, is accompanied by a line that is likely to become as much a part of pop culture as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Hasta la vista, baby.”

Based on a story Alex Mace, “Orphan,” distributed by Warner Bros., is rated “R” largely due to violence and language – and perhaps to one simulated b**w j*b. Leonardo Di Caprio gets producer credit. It looks as if he’ll make money, but not quite in the way he intended.

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