The Man in the Orange Jacket
Latvia | Estonia 2014
Written by Aik Karapetian
Directed by Aik Karapetian
Watched on 30.04.2015

“The Man in the Orange Jacket” actually starts off quite nice, with some moody shots of the titular character walking down the streets to an as-of-yet unknown destination, as well as the best scene of the movie: The attack on the well-heeled couple. What other home invasion movies stretch out over an entire film, “The Man in the Orange Jacket” disposes of in five very intense minutes. Which would be great if they would have had an idea how to fill the rest of the running time.

After his attack on the couple, Dan decides to simply stay in their home (since he overheard a conversation that they were about to go on holiday anyway), and from then on, it seemed to me that they didn’t really know what to do with him, or the movie. There are a couple of scenes where he’s frightened and/or is in some sort of danger, which didn’t work for me at all since after what he’d done at the beginning, I simply didn’t sympathize with him. Thus, I didn’t care what/if anything happened to him. It also didn’t help that the movie relied a little bit too much on cheap jump scares. That they actually copied one of them one-to-one didn’t help either; that was just lazy. Plus, after the first one I didn’t “trust” the movie any more, expecting another jump scare whenever things got quiet – which prevented the quieter moments from working, since I never lowered my guard again and thus couldn’t relax into them. It didn’t help that the longer the movie went, the more you had to question everything that was going on, thanks to Dan’s increasing hallucinations and fantasies of violence. “That one actually nice scene that you just saw? Guess what: It never happened.” Thus, I increasingly didn’t know if what happened on-screen actually did happen, or if it was just another illusion. There may be those who like this kind of play with reality and “dream”, but as for me, it just took me even further out of the movie. Now, there’s actually one more great scene after the beginning, which is Dan showing the hookers around, pretending that it’s all his – accompanied by the “Flower Duet”. That scene was so great that it actually made me laugh out loud, despite my increasing annoyance with the movie. Unfortunately, the rest of the film, and especially the stupid ending, quickly destroyed any goodwill that this funny scene managed to invoke within me. Overall, “The Man in the Orange Jacket” offers up very tense five minutes at the beginning, some nice visuals, and one really funny scene – but not much else.
3/10

IMDB