Orphan

Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2009 film starts with a couple who have lost a baby bringing Esther home from an orphanage. The story is by Alex Mace, the screenplay by David Leslie Johnson. Isabelle Fuhrman was cast as Esther in 2008, while still a child, after a nationwide search, and played the same part again at twenty five in the 2022 prequel Orphan: First Kill. Shooting took place in Canada: St. Thomas, Toronto, Port Hope and Montreal. Most of those 123 minutes go not to horror set pieces but to a marriage coming apart and to a woman nobody believes; if you want a jolt every ten minutes, the middle stretch is long. Adoption organisations objected when the film opened, among them the National Council for Adoption, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption and the Christian Alliance for Orphans. Warner Bros. pulled the trailer line about how hard it must be to love an adopted child as much as your own, and put a far more neutral one in its place. A good fit if you can take the first ninety minutes as the scenes of a mother not being believed and a marriage dissolving rather than as horror. Not for viewers inside an adoption or close to one: what those organisations objected to was this premise itself.