The Bad Orphan (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 23) I watched a trifecta of movies on TV, two of them from Lifetime and one from Turner Classic Movies. The Lifetime ones were the one I’d skipped the night before, The Bad Orphan, and a new “premiere” called Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story. The promos for The Bad Orphan had made it look like a knockoff of The Bad Seed: long-term interracial couple, Black architect Karl Long (Mark Taylor) and his white wife, realtor Jessica Long (Betsy Brandt, top-billed) already have a teenage daughter, Rhiannon, called “Rhee” for short (Eve Edwards, who shows the right degree of racial ambiguity we can believe her as the offspring of a mixed-race couple). But they want another child, and since they either won’t or can’t have another au naturel they’ve decided to adopt. Only their attempts to adopt a baby keep falling through, so in desperation they take on an eight-year-old girl, Gabrielle “Gabby” Sadler (Chloe Coco Chapman), despite the warning from the adoption agency that the child has “special needs.” We’ve already seen a typical Lifetime prologue in which Gabby has set fire to the home of her previous foster parents – though the male half of the couple was drunk at the time and the authorities rule he probably started the fire by accident. When Gabby shows up she’s hostile from the get-go to both her adoptive parents and Rhiannon. She rips down all the posters from Rhiannon’s bedroom wall and puts them up in her own room, and even steals Rhiannon’s track trophies and displays them as her own. She also looks oddly, shall we say, well-developed for an eight-year-old, and when she’s taken to school the authorities are perplexed by how much she already knows even though she’s supposedly never been to school before.

Gabby’s official origin story was that she was born in Portugal to a U.S. couple, but her mom decided to abandon her dad and pair up with a Portuguese man, who later died in a major earthquake that conveniently destroyed all records of Gabby’s previous existence. Gabby was shipped off to her grandmother June (Maureen Rooney), but June soon got age-related dementia and had to be packed off to a nursing home, leaving Gabby to the untender mercies of the foster-care system. Actually, it soon dawns both to Gabby’s adoptive parents and to us that Gabby is quite a bit older than she’s said: we’re later told she’s really 15 and at one point she had a friend forge a Portuguese birth certificate for her, giving her age as eight. Alas, Gabby so torments Jessica in particular that in sheer desperation Jessica ties her up and sticks her in a kitchen cabinet – with the result that she’s adjudged guilty of child abuse and sent to a mental institution, while Karl, Rhiannon and Gabby stay together and settle into an uneasy piece. There’s a final close-up showing Gabby wearing one of Rhiannon’s barrettes in her hair, indicating a) she’s still up to her no-good ways and b) there’s almost certainly going to be a sequel to this, just as there was to Lifetime’s rancid 2018 remake of The Bad Seed (in which the “bad seed”’s dad, played by Rob Lowe, who also directed, tries to kill her once he realizes she’s a psycho but is killed himself before he can do so) to which this one owed a lot more than it did to Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film of The Bad Seed. The director is Michelle Ouelett, a name I’ve seen in fair-to-good Lifetime movies before, and the writer, Doris Egan, does a workmanlike job.

If there’s a saving grace to this film, it’s in the remarkable performance of Chloe Coco Chapman in the title role. There’s an odd ambiguity about her in that the link to her on imdb.com goes to another Chloe Chapman altogether, a producer and director known for Indecent Proposal (2015), Noisey (2016) and No Passport Required (2018). The only actress named “Chloe Chapman” listed on imdb.com made just one film, a horror short called Spotlight (2017). I had to do an online search and found a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/movies/2024/06/14/lifetime-chloe-coco-chapman-betsy-brandt-bad-orphan/stories/202406200001) article on the real Chloe Coco Chapman, a 17-year-old “little person” who attends Keystone High School in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. She gave an interview with the Post-Gazette in which she talked excitedly about how thrilled she was to be making her acting debut in The Bad Orphan. “It’s insane!” she exulted. “I never thought that my first anything would be this big or with Lifetime. I was overwhelmingly excited when my mom told me about this role. I think I ran around my house with excitement!” She studied acting at Barbizon PA, a school with dual locations in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Chapman told the Post-Gazette, “I’ve always wanted to be a role model to other people. It’s awesome I get to be in a movie and show other little people ... and people with disabilities in general that they can be in movies and do stuff they didn’t think they could do.” Just how making a movie in which she plays a psycho killer who poses as an eight-year-old is going to advance the cause of rights for people with disabilities in general and little people in particular isn’t clear to me, but Chapman triumphs in the role and it’ll be interesting to see where her career goes from here.