Orphan: First Kill Is the Most Bonkers Horror Prequel In Years: Review
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The Pitch: Remember Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), the precocious tot who turned out to be a thirtysomething psychopath from Estonia with hypopituitarism? The one who terrified Vera Farmiga and her well-to-do New England family in 2009’s surprisingly chilling Orphan? In the grand tradition of Annabelle: Creation and Ouija: O-ouija-n of Evil, The Boy director William Brent Bell takes us back to Esther’s beginnings, thirteen years later and with a fraction of the budget.
Perhaps “beginnings” is a bit of a stretch, to be fair: a more accurate title would be Orphan: Second (or Maybe Third?) Kill, as we’re introduced to little Leena in 2007 Estonia, two years prior to the first film’s events. She’s not Esther yet, but she has already offed her first host family, the one Vera learns about in the original; she’s holed away in the Saarne Institute, scarred from her restraints but still looking for a way out.
Through some derring-do and her signature flair for manipulation, she makes her escape and eventually finds her next marks: A wealthy Connecticut family searching for their missing daughter… Esther, with whom she (apparently) bears enough of a passing resemblance.
Passing herself off as the real Esther, she plies the same tricks she’d eventually pull on Vera and family — gaslight the mother (Julia Stiles’ Tricia), awkwardly seduce the father (Rossif Sutherland’s Allen), and perplex her new siblings (Matthew Finlan’s fencing-champ failson Gunnar). But Esther severely underestimates the dynamic she’s conned her way into, and before long she finds herself on the bloody back foot in ways she doesn’t expect.
Orphan: First Kill (Paramount)
Forced Perspective: The creepy child is a longtime horror staple, from Damien in The Omen to Demon Seed to Rosemary’s Baby, the list goes on; what made 2009’s Orphan feel so novel was that it played those beats to a tee and grounded them in the story of a parent suffering from grief and substance abuse.
Fuhrman’s steely-eyed, calculated turn was so watchable, effortlessly flitting between porcelain-doll precociousness (with those ribbons and her vintage American Girl Doll look) and cold, violent outbursts. First Kill understands that Fuhrman is the key to Esther and sees fit to return her to the role. The problem (or the point?) is that Fuhrman is 25 now, and First Kill asks Esther to be even younger than we first saw her.
The results, simply put, are bizarre: Fuhrman, her face now fully adult and her voice deeper, puts on the same pigtails and stockings as before, Bell using Fuhrman for closeups and some goofy forced-perspective shots against the adults in the room.
For shots from behind and far away, Esther’s filled in by appropriately-sized child body doubles. It’s not too far removed from what Valérie Lemercier pulled off in the early scenes of her Celine Dion sorta-biopic Aline: put a visibly older actor in the clothes and perspective of a child and just let the audience deal with the uncanniness.
You can see where they’re going with this: Leena’s actually an adult, after all, and the gulf in age and temperament should highlight the innate wrongness of her being. Plus, the audience already knows her whole deal — we no longer need to be fooled into thinking she’s a child, the camera seeing her for the murderous grownup she is.
But the way it plays out in the film itself is pretty laughable; the lines between wide shots of little Esther and close-ups of Fuhrman’s grownup face are just too silly for words. (Fuhrman also seems to have forgotten how to play Esther, right down to having a different Eastern European accent than it seems she had in the first.)
Orphan: First Kill (Paramount)
Why I Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly: Yet, silliness seems to be First Kill‘s greatest weapon, though how intentional that might be is up in the air. The film itself feels like one of those cheaply–made, Vancouver-based DVD sequels you’d see on video store shelves in the 2000s; there’s a hazy, smoothed-out sheen to Karim Hussein’s dreary cinematography that invokes Sherlock more than a few times. (There’s also, I kid you not, some of the most atrociously glaring green-screen in the film’s climax; your jaw will drop to the floor.)
And yet, Hussein, who’s shown his stuff in slicker films like Possessor and Antiviral, makes the most of it with some inventive compositions and a deceptively elegant oner tracking Esther’s escape from her mental facility in the first act.
The script, by David Coggeshall (The Scream TV series, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia), is dreary and derivative until it’s not, a testament to its commitment to the rug-pull it spends a solid hour building up to. It’s a wild twist I daren’t reveal here, but it’s liable to make you perk up your ears and pay attention for the rest of the film’s runtime.
It’s also a blessing for Stiles, who spends the first half in bland, grieving mother mode before growing far more wily and calculated as her dynamic with Esther changes dramatically. The rest of the supporting players are nothing special, though, between Sutherland’s sleepy, guileless artist papa — guess where Esther learns how to do all that ultraviolent painting? — and Finlan’s sneering brat.
Despite the neat subversion of Esther’s usual modus operandi — turning her from predator to endangered species — First Kill does frustratingly little with such a crazy premise. There are some fun moments of camp, especially as a frustrated Stiles calls Esther everything from a “psycho dwarf” to a “mutant grifter” to a “deformed freak,” or the image of a dead rat spinning around in a garbage disposal. If only there were more moments of abject goofiness like this.
The Verdict: Orphan: First Kill is an almost impossible film to put your finger on, walking that incredible tightrope between chintzy direct-to-video schlock and purposeful, delightful camp. It looks like a BBC production shot for $5, but that leans even harder into its Lifetime-movie-on-crack presentation (and lets you grade its moments of visual grace on a massive curve).
Fuhrman’s whole too-old-for-this thing is so uncanny it circles back around to deliberately unsettling. And the mid-film twist turns what feels like a rote and tired cash-in into a genuinely novel game of wits between two actors more than game to go broad. It’s horrible one minute, amazing the next, and for those contradictions alone, it’s at least worth a watch — if only out of morbid curiosity.
Where’s It Playing? Orphan: First Kill heads to theaters, VOD, and Paramount+ on August 19th.
Trailer:
Orphan: First Kill Is the Most Bonkers Horror Prequel In Years: Review
Clint Worthington
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