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Orphan: Bad Seed a bit better
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Once you get past thudding horror movie music, obvious plot holes, and the fact that the final twist was leaked to the internet so long ago it barely qualifies as a twist (try, if you can, not to search the internet), the Bad Seed update Orphan elevates formula with what most horror movies don’t even attempt: interesting characters.
It helps that Esther, the orphan of the title, is played by Isabelle Furhman, a relative newcomer who vacillates easily between icy evil and endearing shyness. Esther seems like an oddly reserved Russian nine-year-old with weird jewelry and a talent for painting; she’s revealed to be as psychologically screwed up as Kate and John Coleman (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard), the adoptive parents who scoop her up from an orphanage so that Kate, a borderline alcoholic, will stop mourning the baby that died in utero, and John will stop lusting after trashy moms who flirt with him at the playground. They live in a beautiful house that, because this is a horror movie, is absolutely isolated, and have a deaf daughter (Aryana Engineer) who looks up to the enigmatic Esther, and a smart aleck son (Jimmy Bennett) who joins his classmates in mocking Esther’s oddly formal dress.
What is wrong with Esther? The reveal raises a lot of logic questions, but there’s not much point in going into them. The two leads have terrific chemistry and are easy to sympathize with even when Farmiga’s wariness gets old and Sarsgaard’s obliviousness just gets stupid. And though the climax takes its cues from dime-a-dozen slasher flicks, restrained writing, invested performances, and just the right amount of humor make it real. You’re watching a family you might know go through the unimaginable, which makes it scarier than it has any right to be.
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