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Thursday, January 14, 2010

BD impressions: Orphan

5:15 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

As yet another take on the venerable "scary child" branch of the horror genre, Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan has a handful of aces up its sleeve, primarily believable performances by Vera Farmiga as a recently bereaved mother who adopts a creepily precocious young girl and Isabelle Fuhrman as that girl. There is of course little that you wouldn't find in recent movies in the same vein such as Godsend and the remake of The Omen, but the performances, and Collet-Serra's knack for creating an eerily foreboding atmosphere, lift it above its stable-mates. The usual problems with these films, most notably characters acting in a completely bone-headed manner and refusing to see what's right in front of their noses, are readily apparent, but you can argue that this merely goes with the territory. It's definitely not, in my opinion, "the horror film of the year" (as the quote on the front cover from The Times would have you believe), but it's streets ahead of The Unborn or My Bloody Valentine 3D, which make up the arse-end of the genre's output for 2009. Even the unusual length for a genre picture of this sort (over two hours) is not the bummer it could so easily have been, with the director's decision to take things slow and build up the characters in the first half paying dividends in the second, as everything slowly unravels.

Image quality: Orphan is owned by Warner in the United States, and I assume their BD release features a middling bit rate VC-1 encode, as per usual. In the UK, thanks to Studio Canal having partially funded the film, the distribution rights ended up with Optimum, who have done one of their characteristic (at least for their BD-50 titles) high bit rate AVC jobs. Not that you'd necessarily know it from looking at it, as the fairly heavy grain seems to often choke the encoder, resulting in noticeable artefacting and causing the grain to take on a "stucco" appearance. Detail is impressive, although a number of shots have an over-sharpened look, with the finest details seeming to have an unnatural prominence. Also, as with an alarming number of Optimum titles I've come across, the levels are elevated, meaning that the darkest hue is not true black but dark grey. 7/10

Orphan
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 29.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 34.56 Mbit/sec

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