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Despite sev­eral trusted friends telling me how much they liked this film, I put off watch­ing it, but not for my usual rea­sons. I put off watch­ing Orphan because I knew that it would be more infu­ri­at­ing than scary. “Killer child” flicks gen­er­ally all work out the same way: one par­ent sus­pects the child is evil and manip­u­la­tive and one par­ent dis­counts the judg­ments of the other par­ent based on some shared his­tory. Mean­while, the audi­ence is scream­ing its fuck­ing head off– but not because the movie is scary, but because their blood pres­sure cuffs are about to pop of their god­damn arms as a result of total and complete aggravation.

This is a story of an overly for­tu­nate and well-educated cou­ple whose mar­riage is qui­etly falling apart and, after expe­ri­enc­ing the loss of a third child dur­ing preg­nancy, feels enti­tled to adopt a pre­co­cious and unusual lit­tle  girl to make it all bet­ter. For some rea­son the nun at the orphan­age con­ve­niently leaves out the fact that bad luck seems to fol­low lit­tle Esther around every­where she goes. When the nun does finally come for­ward to fess up to the Cole­mans, Esther blud­geons her to death with a ham­mer and bul­lies and threat­ens the Cole­mans’ deaf daugh­ter, Max­ine, to help her hide the body.

Pre­co­cious chil­dren can be scary, but usu­ally they just bug the shit out of you. Short of see­ing a Dakota Fan­ning real­ity show, I don’t think pre­co­cious creepy chil­dren could be any more annoy­ing than Esther. This movie was a suc­cess, how­ever, if only in the sense that it pushed my but­tons so badly that I felt as though the anti-anxiety meds I’ve been tak­ing were no longer work­ing. I’m not kid­ding. I had trou­ble get­ting to sleep because it absolutely pissed me off that a grown man would dis­credit his wife and piles of evi­dence (albeit, cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, but so much evi­dence  that you’d think maybe he’d give her the ben­e­fit of the doubt at some point) and side with the most obvi­ously creepy lit­tle girl.

This movie drowns in cliches– which is fine, this is hor­ror after all– but it might have been nice if, at some point, the audi­ence was forced to ques­tion whether or not Kate Cole­man is wrong­fully accus­ing lit­tle Esther of these hor­ri­ble things she’s done. It might have been inter­est­ing if one of the Cole­mans’ other chil­dren were sus­pected (or even guilty). I don’t know, some ele­ment of mys­tery might have been a nice touch and might have spared me a few rage-induced heart palpitations.

SPOILER: The big twist end­ing in Orphan comes when it is revealed that Esther is in fact a 33 year old woman with a hor­mone imbal­ance that keeps her the size of a 9 year old girl. In the final cli­max she takes her make-up off and reveals her­self to be none other than Lind­say Lohan.