Critics reviews

Exarchopoulos is pouty and tempestuous as ever, Haenel complex and intriguing, while Gemma Arterton skips across multiple storylines with typical panache. Occasionally gripping but painfully epic, only the lead actresses' stellar performances save a few sequences from the film's overtly ornate structure.

Even if the screenplay leaves this Paul Haggis-worthy web of cosmic connections unclear until the last act, there were myriad opportunities nonetheless to point at the screen and whisper to the person next to me, "I think that's the orphan.

In short, this film, like it's central character is wilfully complex and surprisingly fluid, wrong-footing us as we try to fill in the spaces between each vignette at the same time as drawing us to its thriller component concerning the cash. Aspects of this are not always fully satisfying...

Nowithstanding its leads' strong presences, the sense of a too loose structure and some repetitive moments in which Karine is variously roughed up or abused leave the viewer uncertain whether the film is offering a lucid and consistent take on its heroine's emotional damage and its causes, or whether it rather glibly ends up making us feel complicit in the exploitation she undergoes.

Faces are filmed so closely that the most beautiful actresses, laid bare, all become ordinary women in distress, easy to relate to, with their artificial makeup or imperfect skins. Unfortunately this stimulating quasi-documentary approach is at times weakened by flat dialogue. Still, des Pallières offers a beautifully singular insight into a dauntless woman's mind, prepared to reinvent herself ad infinitum until she achieves absolute freedom.

As the aggravated, jagged edges of this troubled woman’s life finally fuse together for the audience, Orphan, referring to her chosen state of mind since all those kind to her had ulterior motives, loses its viability to properly galvanize us.

Des Pallières' film is always in motion but its legs are all dry muscle, cutting emotions short. Discovering Orphan is, to be fair, a rather thrilling experience, yet despite its novelistic abundance, one's final state of wonder cannot cover a vague yearning for what wasn't there to be embraced.

Orphan offers four stories of women for the price of one. That’s nothing to scoff at, though by insisting more on how they are different, the film missing out on the biggest prize of all: a larger and coherent portrait of a single, complex individual.