Parents' Guide to

Orion and the Dark

Movie NR 2024 92 minutes
Orion and the Dark movie poster: Animated nighttime characters.

Common Sense Media Review

Jennifer Green By Jennifer Green , based on child development research. How do we rate?

age 8+

Child faces fears in book-based fantasy; peril, scares.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 8+?

Any Positive Content?

  • Orion holding a flashlight with an anxious expression
    1:04
  • Orion and the Dark: Orion in a striped shirt.
  • Orion and the Dark: Orion holds a cell phone far from his body.
  • Orion and the Dark: Orion and Dark in front of the moon.
  • Orion and the Dark: Sweet Dreams in pink hues.
  • Orion and the Dark: The nighttime entities.

Parent and Kid Reviews

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age 10+

Based on 31 parent reviews

Kaete S.
Kaete S. Adult
February 10, 2024
age 10+

Watch first before letting an anxious child see this!

I DEEPLY regret watching this movie with my anxious 8 year old without vetting it first. The trailer made it look like this would be a cute story about dealing with anxieties and finding the beauty in night. Instead we got extreme and highly detailed existential dread of death in the first 15 minutes. There are pretty scary anxious thoughts repeated constantly through the movie, and the character NEVER deals with a seriously medical level of anxiety besides “Feel the fear and do it anyway!” Possibly one of the least helpful things you can tell a highly anxious child. Are there children that would love this rambling, nihilistic, creative story? Oh absolutely! And indeed those kids may adore this movie because you certainly won’t find its like anywhere else. But please, please be careful if you have an anxious child and watch the whole thing first. I was looking for a sweet story to help with bedtime. Instead I got a grab-bag of worse terrors with zero helpful advice, and I expect bedtime is going to painful for a while after this.
kayym1593
kayym1593 Parent of 6-year-old
February 9, 2024
age 10+

Nothing like the book, not worth it.

The movie was nothing like the book At all. It's actually pretty awful, we got through about half way and I was hugely disappointed. The rating is tv-y7 when in reality it should be rated PG. There is a lot of negative depictions of death and dying due to the kids worries and fears that he draws in his book as his way of coping. The dark comes off as mean and self centered when in the book dark was friendly and kind. The other night entities ate mean and cruel as well, not only that but the way *sleep* puts people to sleep is by putting a literal pillow over their faces, like what?? Then the sweet dreams entity is snobby and rude. It's not for young children, and is highly recommended for children over 9. I can't say this one was a good family movie. And is pretty intense and scary for younger kids.
See all 31 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is an 11-year-old boy nearly paralyzed by anxiety, which he's been counseled to sketch about in order to document and manage his fears, in ORION AND THE DARK. But the sketches don't seem to be helping him much, and he goes home on a Friday afternoon convinced he will skip a Monday school field trip that's causing him stress. Instead, when he goes to sleep that night, a character (Paul Walter Hauser) who represents the Dark (which Orion is also scared of) appears in his room and whisks him off on a globe-trotting adventure. As Orion flies around the world, seeing behind the curtains of nighttime, he's plunged into a scenario where he might be the only person who can save humanity. As he recounts this story to his future daughter (voiced as a child by Mia Akemi Brown), some of the details get revised.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (31 ):
Kids say (15 ):

The visual and narrative magic of this film helps to balance a potentially downbeat reading of a generation of anxious kids who, if Orion is any indication, must be taught to live. Written by Charlie Kaufman and based on a book by Emma Yarlett, Orion and the Dark makes its target audience clear in the first lines of the film, when its 11-year-old everyman protagonist says, "I'm a kid, just like you." Orion's nail-biting world is quickly revealed as his fears are entertainingly visualized in childlike drawings that leap off the pages of his sketchbook. These scratches are later complemented with soaring animated dreamscapes of competing ghost-like entities spreading light and dark around the globe, over varied landscapes, towns, and cities.

The film features a narration by German filmmaker Werner Herzog and Kaufman-style narrative-shifting and time-bending, where the action is spliced to flash forward to Orion crafting the story we're watching for his daughter, and back and forth from there. A time-traveling character with monster-tasing weaponry feels completely out of place, until it's revealed it's someone else's imagination who conjured up that scenario. It's all a neat narrative trick that, surprisingly, shouldn't lose young audiences along the way. As Orion's daughter Hypatia complains, adults love simple stories. This film might have some relatively straightforward messages, but it's not exactly a simple tale. And it's better for that.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the portrayal of anxiety in Orion and the Dark. Do you know anyone who deals with many fears? How did or do they handle them? Is there anything you personally can learn from Orion's story?

  • What did you think of the characters of the night: Sleep, Quiet, Insomnia, Unexplained Noises, and Sweet Dreams? What aspects of real life did they incorporate? How was each unique or unexpected?

  • How would you describe the jumping around in time of this story? Did it confuse you to see Orion as an adult or together with his future child? How did these layers contribute to the story?

  • How does Orion find courage? How does Hypatia demonstrate courage as well? How does this character strength help them in their real lives?

  • Would this story qualify as a fable? Why, or why not? If so, what is the moral?

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