Vera Farmiga

By Jim Hemphill

It’s hard to think of a recent American movie that’s as smart and ambitious as Orphan but has so little regard for its own audience’s intelligence. There’s a great horror film buried somewhere underneath the gimmicky sound design (in which the audio is either dead silent or pitched at the level of a Motorhead concert), false scares, and contrived plot twists, but clearly director Jaume Collet-Serra and writers David Leslie Johnson and Alex Mace don’t trust their viewers to appreciate it. They take a challenging, deeply unsettling meditation on the horrors of parenthood and marriage (among other things), and turn it into something so comforting and pat that it makes Ghosts of Girlfriends Past look like Taxi Driver...