‘Orion and the Dark’ Is Charlie Kaufman’s Lazy ‘Inside Out’ Rip-Off

Being John Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman has a singular voice and most modern CG animated movies look and sound alike, which leaves Orion and the Dark stuck in a middle ground between the distinctive and the generic. An adaptation of Emma Yarlett’s book that’s written by Kaufman and directed by first-time helmer Sean Charmatz, the Netflix feature, which premieres Feb. 2, boasts the idiosyncratic anxiety, depression, and angst of its author’s work and the bouncy tone and matching visual style of every other recent cinematic kid’s fable—two flavors that, it turns out, don’t really go well together.

Orion (Jacob Tremblay) is a fifth-grader who’s afraid of everything, from bees and big bad bully Richie Panici (Jack Fisher) to the thought of being humiliated in front of his peers. He’s a ball of nerves, and never more so than when thinking about Sally (Shino Nakamichi), the classmate for whom he desperately pines. While Orion wishes he could sit beside Sally at lunch under a playground tree, he instead munches on his tuna sandwich alone, imprisoned by the myriad phobias that he catalogs—in sketchy form—in his trusty notebook. Even the bathroom is a source of worry for the erudite boy, given that there’s always a chance that flushing the toilet will beget a clog that leads to a catastrophic overflow.

Orion’s prime concern is an upcoming field trip to a planetarium, and this remains true even after Sally asks him, unprompted, to sit together during the outing. His mom (Carla Gugino) and dad (Matt Dellapina) are likewise incapable of convincing him that this will be a fun adventure because Orion is a kid whose fears run so deep that—as evidenced by a brief fantasy sequence—they’re downright existential.

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