Orphan (2009)

  Someone tell me why little girls are inherently creepy?  Example:  Picture yourself somewhere normal, yet still unfamiliar; let's say the hallway of a hotel you've never stayed in before.  You're headed toward your room, bucket of ice in hand, when you turn the corner and see a young girl standing in the hallway.  She appears to be about 8-years-old, her hair is perfectly styled, held back with a wide blue ribbon that matches her slightly old-fashioned, modest dress, atop which is a freshly starched white pinafore.  A doll dangles from her hand.  There are no adults in sight.  What do you do?

You fucking run, that's what.  But make sure you don't do it blindly because you don't know how fast that little snake can move or if she has a twin or something that has snuck up behind you.

As a matter of fact, if you didn't have a flashback to The Shining from that scenario, congratulations, you have just failed Horror Movie Survival 101.

"Come play with us!"

"Not on your fucking life, pipsqueak."

Little overdressed girls should be treated with the same kind of caution as a rabid wolverine.  Take Esther, the eponymous girl from today's movie.

Little girl?  Check.
Tragic past that inspires sympathy instead of healthy paranoia?  Check.
Weird unsettling habits?  Check.
Sudden bursts of violence?  Check.

As a character, Esther is everything you could want in a horror movie.  Sure, it's been done before with The Good Son and even much earlier with The Bad Seed but this one has a cute little twist near the end that's good and disturbing.  The acting is really quite good from all concerned.  The only thing that really sinks this movie is the editing.  Even in the beginning of the film, there are way too many shots done from close in.  This is a cheap horror trick to limit the field of vision so you can then pop out a character and make it look like they appeared from nowhere.  It's extremely heavy-handed here and the movie would have been much more fluid without it.

So, overall, a decent film if you're just in a pro-choice kind of mood but definitely watch it on cable.