Production notes

Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard were cast in main roles in late November 2007. Principal photography for the film took place in Canada, in the cities of St. Thomas, Toronto, Port Hope, and Montreal. Esther of Estonia was inspired by the May 2007 media coverage of 34-year-old Barbora Skrlová, a woman impersonating an orphan who took over her first adoptive family, manipulated the mother and her sister to chain and starve both their sons/nephews, and ran away from the police when caught. She eventually was found impersonating Adam, a thirteen-year-old boy who had gone missing in Norway.

The film opened in the 4th spot at the box office, making a total of $12.8 million, behind G-Force, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and The Ugly Truth. The film went on to gross a worldwide total of $78.3 million.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 60% of 163 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "While it has moments of dark humor and the requisite scares, Orphan fails to build on its interesting premise and degenerates into a formulaic, sleazy horror/thriller." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 42 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave Orphan 31⁄2 stars out of 4, writing: "After seeing 'Orphan,' I now realize that Damien of 'The Omen' was a model child. The Demon Seed was a bumper crop. Rosemary would have been happy to have this baby. Here is a shamelessly effective horror film based on the most diabolical of movie malefactors, a child. You want a good horror film about a child from hell, you got one." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle also gave a positive review, commenting: "Orphan provides everything you might expect in a psycho-child thriller but with such excess and exuberance that it still has the power to surprise." Todd McCarthy of Variety was less impressed, writing: "Teasingly enjoyable rubbish through the first hour, Orphan becomes genuine trash during its protracted second half." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote: "Actors have to eat like the rest of us, if evidently not as much, but you still have to wonder how the independent film mainstays Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard ended up wading through Orphan and, for the most part, not laughing." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D+ score, noting: "Orphan isn't scary – it's garish and plodding." Keith Phipps from The A.V. Club wrote: "If director Jaume Collet-Serra set out to make a parody of horror film clichés, he succeeded brilliantly." The film's content, depicting a murderous adoptee, was not well received by some adoption groups. The controversy caused filmmakers to change a line in one of their trailers from: "It must be difficult to love an adopted child as much as your own" to "I don't think Mommy likes me very much". Melissa Fay Greene of The Daily Beast commented: "The movie Orphan comes directly from this unexamined place in popular culture. Esther's shadowy past includes Eastern Europe; she appears normal and sweet but quickly turns violent and cruel, especially toward her mother. These are clichés. This is the baggage with which we saddle abandoned, orphaned, or disabled children given a fresh start at family life."