ORPHAN

John and Kate Coleman, one year after the death of their future third daughter, decide to adopt a child and choose Esther. The newcomer in the Coleman family immediately proves to be kind and polite, as well as particularly gifted in art. However, her strange way of dressing and her shyness quickly make her the target of mockery from her peers, as well as someone unpleasant in the eyes of brother Daniel. But with time, Esther becomes increasingly strange and her ambiguous behaviors, especially mother Kate, who, despite her husband's disagreement, begins to investigate the child's past. Accompanied by a lively controversy from pro-adoption associations, who complained that the film could inspire fears about adopting children, "Orphan" is the new horror movie produced by Dark Castle, which confirms itself as one of the most interesting realities of the contemporary horror landscape. "Orphan" has a non-negligible merit: it has taken trite and recycled material like the allegory of deviant childhood in the modern dysfunctional family and polished it by introducing variants of considerable originality. The result is a fascinating hybrid between the turbulent childhood horror-drama, which undoubtedly draws from "The Innocence of the Devil," "Mickey," and the more recent "Joshua," and the psychological thriller that straddles the Polanski of the era and the 80s slasher. A strange mixture of which it is difficult to realize without having viewed the work, but which, I assure you, is entirely successful and functional. The Spanish Jaume Collet-Serra, in his second collaboration with Dark Castle after the excellent "The Wax Mask," manages to handle with great mastery a film that in other hands could have seemed too long (it hovers around 2 hours), but instead appears tense and engaging thanks to the excellent dosage of introspective scenes, explanatory ones, and others of great suspense. If it is true that sometimes it plays with the recourse to the easy scare given by sudden appearances and alternation of sound plans (there is also the infamous "game" with the bathroom mirror!), in "Orphan" there is still a skillful construction of the narrative tension that develops from a crescendo of events that seem to lead towards a certain conclusion that instead turns out to be truly original and unexpected. The same long final climax is built with effective concession to the classic tense climate, of those that are lived all at once and do not fail to keep the viewer continuously on edge. "Orphan" benefits from a beautiful screenplay by the debutant David Johnson, a script ordered in which each element/event is timed with the right timings and the characters are finally treated with respect and depth. We will therefore have the entire attention catalyzed on the members of the Coleman family, the classic domestic hearth of the American middle/upper class that behind a veil of normality hides the classic skeletons in the closet that, this time, do not emerge as a plot twist, but are introduced naturally when really needed to accompany the slow unraveling of the initial happiness. To embody the protagonists, there is no Hollywood superstar, but "minor" actors who have the perfect faces for the characters they portray. Vera Farmiga ("The Departed"; "Joshua") and Peter Sarsgaard ("The Skeleton Key"; "Flightplan – Mystery in Flight") play the Coleman spouses, Jimmy Bennett ("Hostage"; "Amityville Horror") and the debutant Aryana Engineer are the two sons, and Isabelle Fuhrman is Esther. In particular, Vera Farmiga and Isabelle Fuhrman give an excellent performance: intense and "physical" the beautiful actress who plays mom Kate, successful and unsettling in her ambiguity the young Fuhrman, of whom we will probably hear about in the future. Very good also the "gore" department, relegated only in a few scenes but for this reason even more effective. The dreamlike-hospital opening already has a semi-splatter taste that manages to send a shiver up the spine, but the apex is given by the crude (and cruel) death by hammer blows that divides the second act in half, a scene of rare meanness that is hard to forget. "Orphan" is an excellent product, a film of those that you go to see thinking you are attending a show that you have already viewed in your mind but that in the end turns out to be an unpredictable surprise. There should be more films capable of this. Highly recommended!