Orphan - the orphan
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Orphan - the orphan |
| Original title | Orphan |
 | |
| Country of production | USA , Germany , Canada , France |
| original language |
English , Estonian |
| Publishing year | 2009 |
| length | 123 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jaume Collet-Serra |
| script |
Alex Mace , David Leslie Johnson |
| production |
Joel Silver , Susan Downey , Leonardo DiCaprio , Jennifer Davisson Killoran |
| music | John Ottman |
| camera | Jeff Cutter |
| cut | Timothy Alverson |
| occupation | |
| |
Orphan - Das Orphan (original orphan , English for " orphan ") is an American psychological horror thriller from 2009 . It was produced by Warner Bros. Pictures in association with Dark Castle Entertainment and Appian Way Productions , Leonardo DiCaprio's company who wrote the script . Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and starring Vera Farmiga , Peter Sarsgaard and Isabelle Fuhrman in the lead roles.
The film is about a couple who adopt a girl named Esther after the stillbirth of their third child . After the girl has moved in with the couple, problems arise that arise from Esther's strange and even violent behavior. When the wife finds out that all personal documents and previous adoption papers are forged , the entire family is ultimately in mortal danger.
Orphan was released in America on July 24, 2009 and in Germany on October 22, 2009.
action
prehistory
Katherine "Kate" and John Coleman are expecting their third child. When Katherine goes into labor , they drive to the hospital. On the way to the maternity ward , Katherine tells a nurse that they will name the child Jessica. But contrary to expectations, a stillbirth occurs, which throws Katherine completely off track. She falls into alcoholism and loses her job at Yale University. She is also haunted by nightmares . But when through her fault her youngest daughter Maxine, who is known by everyone as "Max", almost drowns in a swimming accident in the nearby lake and has to be rescued by John, because Katherine cannot react due to the alcohol, she decides with the Stop drinking. With all this in mind, Katherine is now a regular patient of Dr. Browning, a psychologist .
To compensate for the pain of losing a child, the Colemans decide about two years later to adopt an orphan from a Catholic orphanage . While Katherine uncertainly watches the children playing on the first floor, John meets nine-year-old Esther on the first floor, who is from Russia and paints a picture while singing. John is immediately fascinated by her because of the girl's openness to him. During a short conversation with Katherine, Esther openly confesses that she doesn't really know what to do with the other children and that she is “different from the others”. It is agreed with Sister Abigail that Esther should move to the Colemans in three weeks. The nun also notes that Esther is already very mature for her age and that although she behaves like a princess , she is otherwise a polite and highly intelligent girl.
Esther comes to the Colemans
As agreed, the Colemans pick up Esther from the orphanage three weeks later and she learns that she will now have two siblings: 13-year-old Daniel "Danny" and 6-year-old Maxine, who is almost deaf from birth . Esther begins to learn sign language in the Colemans' car . When they arrive at Esther's new home, they are already expecting their grandmother, Barbara Coleman, and Maxine. Esther immediately takes the latter into her heart. Daniel is more reserved towards her and Esther clearly shows his dislike.
One day, when Daniel was playing with his paint ball rifle in the forest, he deliberately shot a pigeon . Maxine and Esther join them. The latter now asks Daniel to put an end to the suffering of the dove and to kill her. He refuses, however, and so Esther takes a stone and kills the pigeon.
Since Esther always dresses very old-fashioned, she becomes an outsider at school. Above all, her classmate Brenda is after her and harasses Esther every day from now on. In revenge for the teasing at school, she pushes Brenda down the slide and breaks her ankle . Maxine observed the crime on the playground, but covers Esther in the evening out of an emotional bond. However, Daniel insults Esther during dinner and refuses to apologize to her. He explains to his parents that it would be better if Esther went back to the orphanage.
Since Daniel continues to refuse to apologize to Esther, John forbids his son to stay in the tree house again and locks it with a padlock . However, Esther soon shows strange behavior at home: She sneaks through the house and, contrary to all the family's habits, locks the bathroom. Nor does she fit into family life and paints very adult pictures for her age. Over time, Esther becomes more and more threatening and aggressive, begins to play one off against the other and to take advantage of her. After Katherine offered her adopted daughter to teach her the piano , she surprised Esther one afternoon when she played Tchaikovsky perfectly and without any mistakes . Katherine is shocked and starts to distrust Esther more and more.
The murder of Sister Abigail
About a week later, while shopping with Esther and Maxine, Katherine receives a call from Sister Abigail, who needs Esther's medical and dental exam results for her opinion. At the same time she would like to find out how Esther has settled into the new family and of course Brenda's accident comes up. When Katherine confesses to the orphanage director that she wants to learn more about Esther's past, she agrees to investigate. After this conversation, in the evening, Katherine suggests that Esther keep a diary together. In return, she gives Esther her old diary. Both go to Jessica's grave , which is in the greenhouse . Esther admires the white roses that stand on the grave. Katherine then realizes that as long as the roses grew on the grave, Jessica will continue to live in the family. What Katherine does not know, however: Esther is now using Maxine, who can be easily manipulated by her, as a lip reader and is therefore informed of the content of the phone call with Sister Abigail.
Esther now begins to purposefully stir up conflicts within the family. As a result, Katherine's already unstable marriage to the Colemans due to her previous alcohol addiction is further strained. Then, contrary to expectations, Sister Abigail turns up at the Colemans and reports worriedly about some ambiguities in Esther's past. Esther would also have the gift of attracting calamities and she mentions a few incidents from living with Esther. Katherine and John finally agree to meet Esther's psychologist friend Dr. Go see Browning.
Esther, who overheard the conversation, now decides to kill Sister Abigail with the help of Maxine. In John's study, Esther lets Maxine look for the key to the tree house. This will find a whole bunch of keys with the key to the safe on it. Esther opens it and sees a revolver in it . Esther takes it and removes four cartridges from the revolver chamber. She lets the drum with the last cartridge in it run around once, holds the revolver up to Maxine's head and then asks her: "Do you want to play ?" Maxine shakes her head in fear and receives the insensitive reaction from Esther: "Maybe later." Now the two go to the nearby bridge to ambush Sister Abigail. As she is just passing the bridge with her car, Esther cold-bloodedly pushes little Maxine onto the road and accepts that her sister Abigail will run over her. But she can just avoid it and gets stuck in the snow.
After she has recovered from her horror, she gets out and runs to Maxine, who is crying on the side of the road. In front of little Maxine's eyes, Esther now kills Sister Abigail in cold blood with a hammer. The completely intimidated Maxine now has to help make the body disappear. The bloodstained dress and the hammer are both hidden in Daniel's tree house. “You tricked me!” Complained the horrified Maxine to Esther. This explains to her that she had to kill Sister Abigail because she wanted to remove her from the family. Finally Esther asks Maxine if she intends to tell the story of Sister Abigail's murder, whereupon she just shakes her head.
When they both leave the tree house, they are watched by Daniel. At night, Esther shows up in his room and threatens to cut off his penis if he should pass on his observation.
The open confrontation with Katherine
The next day, Katherine drives Daniel and Maxine to school. Once there, she asks her children whether there are any problems with Esther. When Daniel and Maxine deny this, Katherine is visibly amazed because she knows that Esther and her son hate each other. In the afternoon, Esther's appointment is with Dr. Browning. But the girl cleverly plays the Colemans off against the psychologist and after this visit the Colemans' marriage is in crisis like never before. Esther now begins to deliberately portray Katherine as incapable and tries to drive her back into alcohol addiction. In return, she consciously risks Maxine's life again, because a short time later, when Katherine's children are driven to school in the car, Esther releases the handbrake of the car so that it rolls backwards down the street with Maxine. Katherine now openly suspects Esther to have manipulated the car, which she firmly denies. Maxine begins to record her experiences with Esther in self-painted pictures, because she doesn't dare to tell her parents about it. Shortly before, Esther had threatened her again that she would shoot her mother if Maxine told something about the nun's affair.
One day Esther has her dentist appointment, but refuses to attend. John and Esther agree to reschedule the appointment and instead draw together downstairs in the living room. Both talk there. “I think Mommy doesn't like me very much,” Esther says to John. He replies: “She loves you. Make Mommy happy. ”When Katherine comes home that evening, Esther announces a big surprise to her. Then she shows Katherine a large bouquet of white roses that had previously been on Jessica's grave. Katherine is furious, hits Esther, snatches the flowers from her hand and holds her by the arm. When trying to free herself from the grip, Esther twists her arm. Esther runs to her room crying, John and Katherine argue in the kitchen. As a result, Katherine leaves the common house.
During the night Esther sneaks into the cellar and breaks her own arm there by clamping it in a vice. Back in her room, Esther calls John and convinces him that Katherine is responsible for the injury. When she comes back home, a heated argument develops between the couple, culminating in the fact that John expels his wife from the bedroom and instead allows Esther to sleep with him in the marriage bed. After this argument, Katherine drives around in the car, completely distraught and aimless. She only stops at a drugstore and buys two bottles of wine. When she comes home, the family is already asleep and so she is sitting alone in the living room and has already opened a bottle. Ultimately, however, she pours the wine down the drain in the kitchen, untouched, and hides the other bottle.
A few days later, the Colemans paid a visit to Dr. Browning. This advises Katherine to have an official detox in a sanatorium . Katherine is beside herself and refuses therapy, saying that she can help herself. In response, John announces that he will leave Katherine and claim the children for himself after the divorce if she does not agree to the rehab. He accuses his wife of relapsing into alcoholism after the children found the hidden wine bottle in the house. Katherine replies that it was more likely Esther who discovered the bottles. She suspects that Esther might have found out the hiding place from her old diary, which she gave her. Now that she has got hold of Esther's Bible, she begins to deliberately research Esther's past. Katherine's research leads to a psychiatric clinic in Estonia , the Saarne Institute . Katherine exposes the few documents as forgeries and thus finds out that no real documents exist about Esther.
The attempted murder of Daniel
One evening Daniel visits Maxine in her nursery and asks her about the incident in the playground, the death of Sister Abigail and the matter with the car. However, Maxine refuses to talk about it. Instead, she now shows Daniel her pictures. When asked whether Esther was responsible for everything, she nods and describes to her brother where Esther has hidden the evidence. Daniel decides to take action against Esther, but she overheard him and Maxine.
The next morning, Daniel sets off for the tree house to convict Esther of the murder, but she followed him unobtrusively. She drives Daniel into a corner of the tree house, spills gasoline, and sets it on fire. Then she locks Daniel up in the tree house. This can escape through a window, but falls into the depths. Since Daniel survived the fall, Esther tries to kill him with a stone, but Maxine can prevent her by throwing herself in the back.
Meanwhile, Katherine Coleman is talking to her mother-in-law Barbara, sees the fire from the kitchen window and rushes to Daniel's help. In the hospital, he is put into an artificial coma . The entire Coleman family is in the hospital that evening. Esther asks her grandmother for money to buy something to drink. In reality, she sneaks into Daniel's hospital room and tries to suffocate him with his pillow after the unsuccessful arson attack. When she lets go of him, Daniel is clinically dead. However, the doctors who have rushed to bring him back to life. When Esther returns to the family with a bottle, Katherine slaps her on the face. Katherine openly accuses Esther of wanting to murder her son Daniel. The doctors give Katherine a sedative and keep her in the hospital overnight. John drives back home with the children.
The truth about Esther
At the hospital, Katherine receives a call from Dr. Värava, the head of the Estonian Saarne Institute s. He confirms her suspicion that Esther is faking a false identity . Esther's real name is Leena Klammer , is a 33-year-old woman and was also committed to the Saarne Institute as a highly dangerous, psychopathic murderer for at least seven murders. Due to the hormone disorder pituitary insufficiency , which inhibits growth, Esther has the appearance of a child. You can only draw conclusions about her real age from her teeth, which she conceals with a child's set of teeth, which explains her refusal to attend the dentist's appointment. A year ago she managed to escape from the institute and went into hiding abroad. She then allowed families to adopt her repeatedly and then tried to seduce the husbands. If she was rejected, Esther wiped out the entire family in revenge. Shocked, Katherine realizes that her family has been in extremely serious danger during Esther's entire stay in her house. Dr. Värava also tells her that if Esther is actually Leena Klammer, she doesn't have much time left to save her family.
Esther's end
After Katherine learned the truth about Esther, she realizes what she was up to from the start. She drives home and calls the police while driving. In the meantime, John is getting drunk in the living room when suddenly Esther appears. Dressed provocatively and with make-up, she now begins to seduce John. However, he refuses to have sex with her because he does not know Esther's history and only sees her as a child. Esther, completely disappointed, retires to her room and has a fit of anger there. Esther destroys the house's power lines and then stabs John to death in the hallway. Then she goes to his office and takes the revolver out of the safe.
Little Maxine, who has woken up and sees her father's corpse, is hiding from Esther in the greenhouse. Meanwhile, Katherine returns home and discovers her dead husband. Esther starts chasing Katherine around the house and manages to shoot her in the bathroom. After a wild chase, a big showdown takes place between the two of them at the frozen lake, which is located near the house . Katherine and Esther break into the lake during the fight, and Esther eventually breaks her neck after being kicked in the head by Katherine.
Background and filming
- Due to the extreme depiction of violence, the scene in which Esther kills sister Abigail with a hammer was recorded separately from the young actress Aryana Engineer.
- Young actress Aryana Engineer is actually almost completely deaf and therefore fluent in sign language.
- All actors (with the exception of Aryana Engineer) took sign language lessons with the help of specially trained professionals before filming began.
- Isabelle Fuhrmann (Esther / Leena) was (in contrast to her character, who, as it turned out at the end of the film, was around 33 years old) at the beginning of the shooting only eleven years old.
- Although the film can have a very disturbing effect on young viewers due to its oppressive atmosphere, the film has been approved by the FSK in Germany from the age of 16. The FSK justified the release by stating that “only very few bloody scenes could be seen” in the film, and otherwise young people could easily follow the plot. However, as with almost all films of this type, the FSK issued a recommendation to parents when they were released on DVD not to let young people watch the film without their parents being present.
- The film shows several parallels to the case of Barbora Skrlova, an adult woman who lived in the Czech Republic as a foster child with a torturing mother.
production
Most of the film was shot in Canada , primarily Toronto , Port Hope and Montreal . It was originally planned to shoot the film in late autumn, but a sudden onset of winter interfered with the shooting, so the script had to be rewritten at short notice.
synchronization
The film was set to music at Berliner Synchron . Kim Hasper wrote the dialogue book and directed the dialogue.
| role | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Kate Coleman | Vera Farmiga | Ulrike Stürzbecher |
| John Coleman | Peter Sarsgaard | Timmo Niesner |
| Esther | Isabelle Fuhrman | Kristina Tietz |
| Sister Abigail | CCH pounder | Astrid Bless |
| Daniel Coleman | Jimmy Bennett | Philip Kazcor |
| Max Coleman | Aryana Engineer | (mute) |
| Dr. Browning | Margo Martindale | Katja Nottke |
| Dr. Värava | Karel Roden | Grigory Kofman |
| Grandma Barbara | Rosemary Dunsmore | Traudel Haas |
| Sister judith | Genelle Williams | Damineh Hojat |
Reviews
“ Orphan - The orphan is disturbing and gripping from the start. Vera Farmiga convinces as a guilty, confused adoptive mother. Isabelle Fuhrman, on the other hand, steals the show from everyone. Great, how she explores all the nuances of her figure from good to seductive to cruel. A damn bad girl. "
"The exciting, largely coherent horror film revives the well-known 'devil's child' motif thanks to an ambitious dramaturgy that relies on interesting characters and the drama of intra-family tensions, as well as a haunting and realistic staging."
“Admittedly, the fact that the horror sits behind a friendly facade is not exactly the new discovery of a story in the horror genre. But the nasty calculation with which the apparently nice girl gets to work is worthy of all honor. Director Jaume Collet-Serra [...] has come up with a few lively ideas to let evil rage in a nice family. Sometimes he staged it so perfidiously that memories of nightmare works like Rosemary's Baby are awakened. Strong: the young Isabelle Fuhrman as a cunning beast. "
Web links
- Orphan - Orphan in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Orphan - The Orphan at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Orphan - The Orphan at Metacritic (English)
- Orphan - the orphan in the online film database
- Orphan - The orphan in the German synchronous file
- Trailer
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for the orphan - the orphan . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2009 (PDF; test number: 119 872 K).
- ↑ German synchronous index: German synchronous index | Movies | Orphan - the orphan. Retrieved April 5, 2018 .
- ↑ Michael Ranze: A damn bad girl , review in the Hamburger Abendblatt from October 22, 2009 (online version)
- ↑ Orphan - The Orphan. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Orphan - The Orphan. In: prisma.de . Retrieved October 8, 2017 .