When their mother dies of a heart attack, grieving siblings Thomas (Gary Lewis), Michael (Douglas Henshall, looking like Kenneth Branagh by way of Jeffrey Jones), John (Stephen McCole, previously turned into a fly in The Acid House), and cerebral-palsied Sheila (newcomer Rosemarie Stevenson) react in their own unique fashions. With a funeral scheduled for the next day, Thomas, the oldest and most straitlaced (read: anal) makes a promise to his late mother to stay all night in the church and watch over her coffin. Before he can get to the church, however, he stops at a karaoke bar with the rest of his family, where he sings a teary-eyed song that causes many of the drunken patrons to laugh at him, and brothers Michael and John to start a fight with same.
Before long Michael is stabbed (not fatally), John is vowing revenge, and Thomas and Sheila are in the church, where Sheila does not want to be for the entire night, though her physical condition prohibits her from being left alone. When Sheila rebels by ramming her wheelchair into a statue of the Virgin Mary, shattering it on the floor, Thomas loses his cool and sends her home by herself. How the characters make their way through the night to their mother's funeral provides the crux of the action: Sheila trying to get home in her wheelchair, John in search of revenge, Thomas determining to hold fast in the church no matter what, and Michael in a bizarre quest to make it to work so he can pretend the stab wound was sustained on the job and get the Scottish version of workman's comp.
Grief lurks at every turn, causing the characters to react in generally hostile and unpredictable fashion to their surroundings, which include plenty of the aforementioned drunken thugs with their profane term of address, in addition to more unpredictable fare. Sheila finds herself "adopted" by a group of young girls in party hats who sing French nursery rhymes; John enlists the help of a thuggish, Billy Connolly-loving delivery man to obtain a gun, only to wind up an accessory to a surreal home invasion; and Michael, with his stab wound oozing conspicuously all the while, discovers a bar where the penalty for less-than-perfect behavior is to get locked in the storeroom for the rest of the night. There's a good deal of humor to these proceedings, but never does it mock the grief of our principals, nor do the chuckles come at the expense of their humanity.
Every punch, every drop of blood is earned and taken seriously; these guys may be tough, but they're hardly indestructible. When Michael suggests that a vulnerable foe needs to have his head smashed in with bricks, then be turned on his back so that he chokes on his own blood, the rest of the cast are suitably appalled, despite having been horribly victimized by the same foe. "But I'm not really the best person to ask right now," adds Michael, who then offers the alternate suggestion to simply take the man's wallet and "run like fuck."
Orphans is essentially in the tradition of such movies as After Hours and The Out-of-Towners, in which a beleaguered protagonist must navigate a city at night and, against all obstacles, make it to an appointment the next day. The twist here is that not only are there four protagonists (one of whom doesn't budge), but also that they choose the dark path through rain-soaked streets, driven by sorrow to confront something, anything, they can take out their frustrations on rather than admit to helplessness. Factor in an unexpectedly high level of dark humor, and the resulting film captures the perfect balance of hipness and despair that so many aspire to, all without any gratuitous gunplay or smarmy pop-culture references.
Curiously enough, it's the straitlaced brother Thomas who comes off the worst. He's on his best behavior the whole time, even going so far as to pathetically attempt to cement together the shattered Virgin Mary statue, but is so uptight that he won't break a promise even to help his family in need. Meanwhile, his two brothers, having behaved terribly and suffered for it, come off all the more heroic. Sheila has fewer obstacles in her way, but is constantly fighting against her own physical inadequacies, never more so than when trying to use the toilet at a stranger's house. The moral, one supposes, is that going out into the world and suffering is still better than not trying at all.
