Orion and the Dark: A Kid’s Movie For Werner Herzog

Charlie Kaufman is a neurotic writer. Between Synecdoche, New York, Adaptation, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, no one else has made me feel like I’m getting a blood test quite like him. His words are sterile to the touch. The obvious question with Orion and the Dark, a new Netflix animation, written by Kaufman and adapted from Emma Yarlett’s picture book of the same name, is how his existentialist style plays into a children’s movie. Truth be told, it’s a lot better than you might think.

Orion is an 11-year-old boy who is deathly scared of anything and everything around him: from bees to dogs to phone waves that give you cancer (the first pre-cursor that this isn’t your typical family-friendly fare), this is a boy shaking at the thought of breaking out of his bubble, even if it means not going to the planetarium with his crush, Sally. The thing that frightens him most, though, is the dark. Every night, he screams and cries and wakes his parents up, that is, until Dark himself, a ‘night entity’ voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, turns up and takes him on a journey to show him the beauty of the night and overcome his fears, with a bit of help from his ‘night entity’ friends.

It’s a simple premise, but like all of Kaufman’s work, he fills it to the brim with strange framing, adult jokes, and, in this case, concepts personified - an idea popularised by Inside Out. Sleep, Insomnia, Quiet, Unexpected Noises, and Sweet Dreams all zoom around the night sky, making sure everyone gets to sleep or doesn’t. Orion doesn’t understand why Insomnia is whispering insecurities into people’s ears or why Unexpected Noises is scraping trash cans together to spook little kids, they just tell him it’s ‘their job’. There are a lot of moments like that, where some questions don’t have answers, and that’s okay. This entire film, with its strange structural device - an older Orion telling his daughter Hypatia this story to stop her from being scared of the dark, who then tells it to her own son, Tycho - becomes a story about creating stories and how hard it is for people to understand that not everything has an answer.

Orion says himself that he doesn’t like ‘being condescended to’ by a recycling advert, and maybe the best thing about Sean Charmitz’s directorial debut is that it never tries to. Even when Dark stands there, flies too close to the sun (literally), and commits suicide because people think he’s ruining their lives, Orion is still afraid of him. The beauty of stars in the sky and the wrinkles on actors’ faces are great and all, but they don’t magically upend the eeriness of walking through the park at midnight, in the same way that the constant, joyous sun doesn’t stop the sweltering heat and flaring emotions. These are kids with eye bags who have seen too much of the world at 11 years old and just want a clear path; Kaufman will not give it to them.

Ironically, Orion and the Dark is a film so unafraid of upending children’s film conventions that it refuses to moralise its audience, and that’s what makes it so bold and refreshing, especially with Dreamwork’s recent output of duds. We haven’t seen a kid’s film this wistful since Where the Wild Things Are, and I can only pray that another one comes sooner because these are the types of films that scratch an emotional nostalgia for childhood in a way that nothing else does.