shnam13. Name: Orphan
. IMDb: 7.1/10.0
Rotten Tomatoes: 5.5/10.0
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
Produced by Joel Silver
. Jennifer Davisson
. Killoran
Screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
Story by Alex Mace
Starring Isabelle Fuhrman
Music by John Ottman
Cinematography Jeff Cutter
. Editing by Timothy Alverson
. Studio Drak Castle Entertainment
. Appian Way Productions
. Cast Distributed by Warner Bros.
. Isabelle Fuhrman. Esther Coleman. Optimum Releasing
. Vera Farmiga. Kate Coleman. StudioCanal
. Peter Sarsgaard. John Cloeman. Release date (s) July 24, 2009
. C. C. H. Pounder. Sister Abigail. Country United States
. Jimmy Bennett. Daniel Coleman. Language English
. Margo Martindale. Dr. Browning. Sign Language (US)
. Karel Roden. Dr. Varava. Estonian
. Aryana Engineer. Max Coleman
.
E
valuation:
It’s a shame that we only look at this film as only a commercial film. Actually, we could get a lot of things from this film. We could see this film as a model of way to understand a modern family, religion, gender, and the major problem of international adoption.
This films is about a family that been destroyed by an adopted orphan. Nowadays, inter-country adoption is common in America. Having an adoption is been seeing as a kind of a high-level-charity, and having more kids in family could get more discount from the government. There are two options in adoption, domestic adoption and inter-country adoption. Compare both; inter-country adoption is much cheaper and easier. In opposite, domestic adoption is hard to achieve. The few reasons are, first, there are not many natural disasters in USA, and it limited the number of orphans in US. Second, there seemed to have a higher risk of the child being given back to the birth parents. Third, if adopt domestically will cost 30,000$, then international adoption might only cost 15,000$. Source of international adoption are mostly from Asia, Middle East, Middle Europe, Latin America, and Haiti.
It is good to see adoptions, but we cannot ignore some problems, like problems of inheritance, religion, different cultures, and multi-culture identity. Although, most of family agree to respect orphan’s culture and life style, but in the real world there are tons of problem generated by these problems, and it became an obstacle of keeping peace in family and society.
Because these kinds of problem exist such a long time, it finally accumulated, and it exploded as some commercial films like Orphan as a kind of vent. The problems that I listed are projected in different degrees in the film, only the solution was kind of extreme.
In the film, the adopted “girl” Esther has a strong camouflage, all of her identities are fake, include her age, country where she came from, religion, and her original family. When the audience saw her first time on the screen, she is a perfect girl to adopted,. Through the story she started to acting like the way she is, an extremely cruel heathen, a monster.
Every culture has their own unforgiveable guilt, even if a person cross that line a little bit, he/she will no longer be treated as a human being. In Catholic, they see anyone who is related to seven deadly sins: gluttony, envy, lust, pride, sloth, greed and wrath as an antichrist. We could find all these deadly sins from Esther, and she even killed a kind nun who helped her. In modern days, we see this thing as a blasphemy. Thus, the only way to end the story is let Esther died on the field.
The film not only did the moral trial of Esther, but also mocked and criticized modern society because right now people don’t care anything but good looking and skills. There are also other reasons that the family been destroyed except Esther has a strong camouflage, the family has at least one potential crisis and it provide convenience to Esther. Kate lost a child in her womb, and she was always drunk for that, once she was diagnosed with personality defects. To save the family she and her husband decided to adopt a child, and it was a bad decision.
In the end, Kate finally defeated Esther and become the savior of the family instead of her husband. Even she saved her son and daughter, but she still lost her husband, but we cannot blame her for that. In the whole film, the husband John never trusted Kate, and he didn’t fulfill the duty which is protecting his family. This lack of male function husband is not hard to find in the real world. This film not only confirms the imbalance of gender relations within the family, but also potential crisis in family today.
