Directed By Tom Shankland
Starring Hannah Tointon, Eva Birthistle, Stephen Campbell Moore and Jeremy Sheffield.
Ah, kids. They’re a creature so terrifying that simply pointing a camera at one can help make a movie creepy (or earn you jail time, depending on the circumstances). From The Shining to The Ring, cinema has steadily relied on ‘The Creepy Kid’ to be as reliable and often effective a genre convention as the noble ‘Jump Scare’. In the past few years there’s been a mini-resurgence of creepy kid films, from Joshua to 97.559% of Cameron Bright’s filmography. With The Children, writer-director Tom Shankland takes a stab at a British entry in the sub-genre, since posh English accents and unnerving children are always an easy fit. As two families get together at a remote house in the woods for a Christmas vacation, things get a tad unsettled when the kids start showing symptoms of a strange illness before having their behaviour switch flipped to ‘Homicidal’ and starting to off the adults.
Rather than rely on cheap jump scares, The Children often ratchets up the tension purely by virtue of how brain-piercingly shrill and screamy these damn kids are; much like being stuck sitting next to a crying baby on a bus journey, a dinner scene featuring the unrelenting shrieking and shouting of four toddlers in unison is guaranteed to crank your blood pressure through the roof.
Unfortunately, while The Children is well-made, with a great deal of tension and atmosphere, it’s devoid of any characters who aren’t either insufferable morons, two-dimensional cut-outs or complete wastes of celluloid. Hannah Tointon’s the closest thing to a lead, but while insanely cute, she’s also given a character who’s not much more than another privileged upper-class teen rebelling for no real reason whatsoever. It’s not until the third act that we’re given a reason to care about her, by which time – when she’s the only one taking any real action – it only serves to highlight how infuriatingly dumb every other character is as they either sit around doing nothing or make mind-bogglingly dumb decisions to put themselves in harm’s way (a climbing frame scene is especially infuriating). Shankland throws around the moral dilemma of being a parent forced to harm their own child, but after a while it feels like less a theme well-explored and more a flimsy excuse to justify the stupefyingly retarded actions of poorly-written characters.
Shankland admirably casts “real” kids – there’s no Dakota Fanning-esque precociousness at play in the children here, they’re just as loud, immature and grating as real toddlers are, and the distinct lack of change between the unsettling hyperactive creepiness when they’re normal and when they’re evil (aside from the, y’know, parental mangling) makes things all the more unsettling. But while the source of the evil kid sickness is left unanswered, what’s offered instead doesn’t quite work – numerous hints to Chinese alternative medicine being the cause are thrown out at the audience via pretentious douchepuddle Jonah, and there’s an abundance of muddled abortion-related imagery that never fits coherently, while the editing flits between jittery and unnerving to resembling a bad avant-garde student film.
Ultimately, at an hour and twenty minutes, it doesn’t stick around long enough to be truly horrible, and at times it’s incredibly tense, but for the majority of the film, The Children is an unengaging, messy film littered with unbearable characters, and never manages to be more than a serviceable horror entry. It might just make you want to high-five the parent who smacks their kid in the supermarket cereal aisle though, assuming you don’t do that anyway.
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Directed By Jaume Collet-Serra
Starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard and Isabelle Fuhrman.
There’s something wrong with Esther. She’s trapped in a cliché-ridden movie you’ve seen a dozen times before.
Built on the generic framework of sinister kid movies like The Good Son, and the abundance of bland ’90s domestic thriller potboilers, Orphan tells the tale of Kate and John, a blissfully married couple with two kids who, after tragically losing a third child late in the pregnancy, decide that adoption’s the way forward. They meet bright and artistic Russian 9 year old Esther while touring a local orphanage and become immediately smitten with her, bringing her home to live with their children Max and Daniel. Things then proceed to go about as well as can be expected when bringing home a twisted bundle of malevolence.
Most reviews mention the ending as being the most loopy and notably outlandish part of the movie, and while the final revelation is certainly gleefully daft, yanking the film from the gaping maw of mediocrity, throwing a much-needed dose of originality into the proceedings, it’s the earlier moments that stand out as the most bafflingly out-of-place. An early scene has Kate reading a bedtime story to deaf daughter Max (a scene that’s quite wonderfully shot – director Collet-Serra drops us into Max’s aurally-bereft world, with nothing but a barely-audible static hum and some handy subtitles to read Kate’s lips along with her). Which would be cute, only Kate sits and tells a fairy tale about Max’s unborn sister dying and being yanked away to heaven, while Max ‘listens’ and giggles with glee at every word. It’s intended as a heart-warming mother-daughter moment, and there’s no hint that Collet-Serra intends it as anything more, but it’s a bafflingly strange moment that’s creepier than almost anything Esther accomplishes. It’s also never explained quite how Kate came to own a published book (and a kid’s book, no less) so strangely specific to her miscarriage; Barnes & Noble are evidently stocking some extremely niche titles these days.
Also worthy of note is the sheer hilarious amount of haunting past experiences dumped on the protagonists’ shoulders; most lead characters get one tragic skeleton-in-the-closet to brood over, but ever the overachievers, Kate and John have so many it’s bordering on spoof territory – from the horrible miscarriage to a former drink addiction, a tragic accident where Max almost drowned, and more are all revealed, and that’s just in the first 20 minutes.
That’s not to say it’s a bad film; it’s actually a solid and effective little horror film with some incredibly good acting from Farmiga and especially Fuhrman. The problem is that until the last ten minutes, Orphan glues itself so rigidly to the standard ‘My *Insert Relative Here* is evil and nobody believes me!’ thriller plot beats that anyone who’s ever pointed their retinas towards a movie screen will feel a nagging sense of frustrating deja vu.
Still, while Orphan treads familiar ground, at least it does do in well-made shoes – Collet-Serra handles the film with a style and talent far above the usual bland horror director ilk, and the central performances are better than the content deserves; Fuhrman is quite amazing, not just a child actress blessed with acting ability beyond her years, nailing every nuance of a multi-faceted character flawlessly, but she handles a thick accent with more grace and conviction than most actors with decades of experience. It’s a shockingly good performance, and one that becomes all the more impressive in the final act. Farmiga – who isn’t having a good run of things in the cinematic kids stakes, having already birthed evil in recent creepy kid film Joshua, but also wound up adopting perpetually terrifying child actor Cameron Bright in Running Scared – is great, as always, and proves again that she deserves better than being relegated to ‘young emotional mother’ roles. Peter Sarsgaard, as well as seemingly being named after a Middle Earth fishing village, draws the short straw character-wise, and though he’s an effortlessly natural actor, he’s stuck with a character so stubbornly and bafflingly mistrustful that it’s hard for the audience to relate or engage with him after the first act.
Orphan’s a solid, well-made B movie that’s elevated by excellent performances and a fun ending, it’s just a shame that its adherence to tired plot conventions keep it from being anything truly great.
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The Children is available to buy now on US and UK DVD/Blu-Ray.
Orphan is out now on US DVD and Blu-Ray, and hits UK home video on 30th November 2009.