FILM REVIEW

MELANI PUYOL

Name of film: The Orphan

Type: Horror film, thriller.

Plot: When Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard) lose the
baby they were expecting, everything collapses around them. Their marriage
falters and Kate's mind is filled with nightmares, fears and dreads. To try to get
back to normal, the couple heads to a local orphanage with the intention of
adopting a child. There they are enigmatically attracted to a girl with an angelic
face named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman). But things go wrong after the girl arrives
at the Coleman house, where strange things begin to happen. When Kate
begins to realize that Esther is hiding a terrible secret, she will try to find out
what it is, but it may be too late...

Cast: Isabelle Fuhrman, Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Jimmy

Bennett, Aryana Engineer, Margo Martindale, CCH Pounder, Rosemary
Dunsmore, Karel Roden.

Performance: Barbora Skrlová, the woman who inspired the tape and whose
whereabouts are now unknown. She was born in the Czech Republic with
hypopituitarism and nothing is known about her childhood and family, the only
thing that is known is that she was locked up in a teenage psychiatric facility for
having psychopathic features.

The woman pretended to be a 13-year-old girl and led the sisters Klara and
Katherina Mauerová to believe that she had escaped from a juvenile facility
because she was being abused and said she had nowhere to go. They both
"adopted" her without any legal procedure.

Special effects: This film does not abuse special effects, because they are only
based on the naturalness of an 11 year old girl, although later we can see the
makeup they spend to see how she really is.
Sound track:

The glory of love Isabelle Fuhrman

Surrender Cheap Trick

Rating/ Recomendation:

"'The Orphan' offers everything you'd expect from a psychopathic children's

thriller, but with so much excess and exuberance that it still has the power to
surprise."

"Last minute plot surprise has claw, effectiveness and originality. (...) As a
horror film it can be conventional. As a horror drama (...) it can cause more than
one stomach ache."

The end: Speaking of the end, yes, we're in for a pretty brutal turnaround that
will break our patterns. But it's also true that as the story progresses, we come
across the odd cliché or predictable movement that partly ruins the magnificent
work of the production, although only partly, as I consider the explanation
offered to be unexpected and well argued. Nevertheless, I felt that they tried to
stretch the final minutes without finishing the shine that the story deserved.