‘The Orphan’ Comes to Life

The Orphan horror movies, about an adopted Eastern European girl who turns out to be a murderous adult in disguise, are nonsensical claptrap. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace puts forward the theory they may have been realistic.

That suggestion is the astonishing hook of ID’s six-part, three-night docuseries event (starting May 29), whose tale concerns an Indiana couple who brought a young child into their home only to suspect that she was a duplicitous twentysomething sociopath determined to kill them.

The Curious Case of Natalia Grace’s introductory montage—a routine docuseries convention in which the juiciest elements of the forthcoming story are teased—sets some sort of record for eye-opening details and quotes, and the ensuing tale doesn’t disappoint when it comes to boggling the mind.

The craziness began on April 26, 2010, when Michael and Kristine Barnett adopted a daughter to join a clan that already consisted of three biological sons: Jacob, Wesley, and Ethan. By all outward appearances, the Barnetts were a happy, close-knit and well-off middle-class family, and even local celebrities thanks to Jacob, an autistic genius who was featured on 60 Minutes. Adding another member to the family struck Michael and Kristine as a great idea, and the process came about quickly, via a Florida agency that, upon visiting it, Michael remembers thinking was a bit shadier than he’d expected.

The girl they returned with was Natalia, a 6-year-old who had a rare dwarfism condition known as spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita. After a very brief honeymoon period, Natalia purportedly began exhibiting puzzling and troubling tendencies. Ostensibly born in Ukraine, she had no accent, spoke fluent English and boasted a mature grasp of the language. She had a habit of urinating and smearing feces on surfaces and her siblings. She stockpiled knives beneath her bed, and on one occasion was caught standing over her sleeping parents with a blade in hand. She poured Pledge into Kristine’s coffee cup in an apparent attempt to poison her. Most stunning of all, she was found to have pubic hair, and shortly thereafter, Kristine discovered underwear stained with blood—at which point Natalia supposedly confessed to having her period.

By 2012, these signs indicated to Michael and Kristine that Natalia was really a grown woman masquerading as a kid—and a homicidal one at that. Thus, they successfully petitioned to have her re-aged, with her official birth year changed from 2003 to 1989. That 14-year leap was simply their initial means of dealing with their unique situation. Since the state of Indiana merely requires adults to be responsible for children until the age of 21 (and Natalia was now legally 22), Kristine rented an apartment and more or less left Natalia there to fend for herself. Just as The Curious Case of Natalia Grace features interviews with Jacob Barnett that corroborates his parents’ accusations against Natalia, so do on-camera testimonials from various apartment-complex neighbors describe Natalia’s weird, inappropriate and altogether unhinged adult behavior, from stalking residents and breaking into their residences, to trying to have sexual relations with young boys.

The first half of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace is so rife with anecdotes about Natalia’s Orphan-esque creepiness that it’s easy to think something bizarre is afoot. Though it features a wide range of interview subjects who knew and/or were involved with Natalia and the Barnetts, Michael is the guiding voice throughout, courtesy of separate 2019 and 2022 chats. Yet the deeper the docuseries gets into his story, the less he comes across as a trustworthy narrator. Alternately jovial, screaming-mad, defensive and weepy, Michael paints a compelling portrait of Natalia as a monster, only to do an about-face by blaming his entire ordeal, which left him divorced, alienated from two of this three sons, and facing criminal prosecution, on Kristine—all while conspicuously refraining from addressing his own role in this madness.

As The Curious Case of Natalia Grace explains, once Michael and Kristine relocated Natalia to a second, more dangerous and unfit apartment in Lafayette, Indiana, she was taken in by a woman and a local detective began inquiring into how Natalia wound up on her own. That investigator didn’t believe that Natalia was an adult, and a visit to her birth mother in Ukraine produced a DNA result that confirmed it: Natalia had been born in 2003, meaning she’d first been discarded by Michael and Kristine when she was 9.

It wasn’t long before Michael was in handcuffs and staring down four indictments. However, in what may be the craziest part of this entire affair, the presiding judge refused to let Natalia’s age be a factor in the trial; Michael was charged with abandoning his disabled adult daughter rather than a child, since the judge determined that her legal age had already been definitively established by the prior court ruling.

Even the foreperson for Michael’s jury admits that this was a miscarriage of justice-level mistake. Still, parsing fact from fiction in The Curious Case of Natalia Grace is never totally easy. ID’s docuseries leans heavily on ominous Natalia selfies and goofy dramatic recreations to imply that she’s a devil. Those are then countered by videos and pictures taken by Kristine—of Natalia being mistreated, and of herself in highly sexual situations—that expose her as an abusive and manipulative tyrant. As for Michael, he sheds so many crocodile tears that nothing he says resonates as believable.

A candid closing quote from him (“That’s alright, you’re not getting the crying version. If you want the crying version, I’ll bust that one out”) makes clear that producers are similarly unpersuaded, which is no surprise considering a prior The Jinx-style live-mic conversation between Michael and Jacob that reveals their calculated plan to conceal domestic abuse.

By the time it reaches its off-the-wall, exploitation-drenched conclusion, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace has transformed from an examination of Natalia’s true nature into a series about Michael and Kristine’s villainy. That Kristine is still awaiting trial means that ID’s latest is almost sure to receive a sequel—as does the fact that its finale holds back a hinted-at bombshell that seems destined to further shock and horrify.