Orphan - is this a horror film?

I seem to be talking about horror films a lot with people at the moment, no co-incidence then that I decided to watch one of the DVDs that my Mum leant me at Christmas on Monday evening - Orphan.  Crucially this is not to be mixed up with El Orfanato, the Spanish-language gothic ghost horror from a few years back set in an orphanage.  Orphan is a more recent American production, in which a couple (Kate and John - played by Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) adopt a young Russian girl Esther from a local orphanage.  Kate and John are like any couple; they have their share of skeletons in the cupboard but they love each other and they love their kids.  Their third child died in Kate's womb, and she suffers from recurring nightmares in which she relives the horrific night in the maternity ward when she found out.  She also is a recovering alcoholic, and John has cheated on her in the past.  Skeletons in the closet indeed.

So Esther turns up at their house and because of the poster for the movie you know that she's up to no good.  She immediately does a bunch of weird things, including trying to hurt some of the other kids, painting weird pictures and deliberately disrupting this already less-than-perfect family.  She gets up to a bit of maiming and killing too, but I'm not sure that any of this put the film in the horror genre.  In fact, looking back over the whole film it's difficult to see why it's billed as a horror at all.  It's more like a weird X-Files episode or something out of the Outer Limits.

The opportunity to do horror is there though.  Kate and John's youngest daughter is deaf and the family all talk together in sign language, something that I was rather hoping would become a plot point, or at least the set up for some sort of horror set-piece (maybe she can see something horrible happening but can't speak to warn anyone?).  But that doesn't really happen, which is a shame as it feels like a waste of potential.  Kate and John are both very well-defined characters, which is pleasing in an age of effects-laden movies with terrible protagonists.  Though this is probably down to good acting rather than good scripts, and it's wasted since when the family unit breaks down later in the film the events start to feel very unlikely very quickly. Again it feels like the script writers missed their own potential.

It's because of these things that the film feels like a disappointment.  I was promised a horror film, but I didn't get one.  Even in spite of that there's was a lot of promise in this thriller; a good set-up, good background and a set of nicely-drawn characters; but in the end it all sort of fizzles out into a bit of a chase with some knives and guns.  Especially after the big reveal of what Esther really is, I just sat there thinking "Really? Is that it?".  After that point in the movie it falls a bit flat, and the final scene lacks resolution and fades to black when there really should have been some sort of epilogue.  Overall, it would be very harsh to say this was a bad film.  But don't expect much in the way of scares, and expect to be underwhelmed by the 'twist'.