ORPHAN

The best thing about Orphan, the bad kid-from-hell shocker from Spanish horror director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax) and producers Joel Silver and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the most talked-about movies of the summer so far for its chilling effect on the business of adoption, is the way it plays with the genre’s overused staples and its sophisticated audience’s expectations.

You just know that after two teases, the third bathroom-mirror scene is going to jolt you. When it does, you sneer because it’s just another tease. You know that the nightmare of a ghoulish forced abortion that opens the movie is a premonition of bad experiences with evil kids, but you’re thinking The Omen or The Bad Seed – something in the devil cult or genetic malfunction line. Something familiar, some recycled shock-flick cliché.

You know there’s something creepy about the 9-year-old orphan, Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), an Eastern European with a mysterious background who seems too wise, too canny, too damn polite, but manages to win the hearts of a troubled American couple – Kate (Vera Farmiga), a recovering alcoholic grieving over a recent miscarriage, and John (Peter Sarsgaard), a wealthy architect with a dubious record in the fidelity department – when they decide adoption might heal their psychic wounds. (Orphan has already generated flak among adoption groups for its chilling effect on the business of adoption.)

For starters, it’s noted by Kate and John’s natural offspring – insolent 10-year-old Daniel, played by Jimmy Bennett, and cute, deaf, 5-year-old Maxine (Aryana Engineer) – Esther wears thick velvet ribbons around her neck day and night and outdated clothes that are de trop in a vaguely threatening Victorian gothic way. And she carries a bible to school.

She’s not weird, her new and supposedly enlightened parents insist, just different, and different is good. But when Daniel and Max watch their new sister, without so much as a wince, smash a wounded pigeon to bloody smithereens with a brick, they both know different can also be bad.

Bad in ways shock-flick fans won’t expect. Esther exhibits exceptional artistic skills, plays a killer Tchaikovsky riff on the family piano, and knows the F-word, its meaning and contexts.

She’s somehow present whenever John and Kate get the urge for long-overdue hanky panky – once in the kitchen, once in their own bed when she claims to have been frightened by thunder. And she has a strong revenge instinct, self-defence techniques that border on murderous and get her in trouble at school.

Her malevolent behaviour and duplicity seem random at first, but when Kate begins to believe the child is working on a strategy to destroy the little harmony her family enjoys, she starts doubting the wisdom of her adoption choice and digs for more information about Esther – first at the Catholic orphanage from where she came, and, after the strange disappearance of its senior administrator (a nun played by CCH Pounder), on the Internet, where her worst fears are confirmed.

Too late, it turns out. Esther has already worked her way into the family bosom – by overtly threatening the other children and playing coy and child-like sexual games with John, who blames his wife’s sudden animosity on an apparent relapse.

Because much of the action is seen through the eyes of frightened children, the audience too is a helpless witness to Esther’s unique brand of evil, and as she ramps it up in the movie’s final third, it’s clear a violent and bloody climax is in the works.

Here the clichés come thick and fast – the light-and-dark shadow play, sudden movements in the background, nerve-shattering sound effects and over-amplified musical punctuation, shattering glass, evil deed piled on evil deed, and an over-the-top seduction scene that elicits howls of laughter.

And just as we’re lulled into the presumption of a standard conclusion, we’re treated to a mighty tricky twist, a sinister revelation that comes out of nowhere – well, out of an asylum in Estonia, actually – and confounds the senses and all our expectations.

Shot in and around Toronto and Montreal, Orphan’s shock value benefits from the wintry, isolated locations and from the use Collet-Serra makes of its main set, a beautiful, sprawling modern house, all wood and glass, with high staircases and long corridors and high-end furnishings and fittings.

In this formidable luxury the raven-haired Esther – thanks to Fuhrman’s steely, too-bright smile and black, darting eyes – works as a potent metaphorical canker, a reminder of Americans’ worst fear: creepy foreigners.