Mark Reviews Movies: ORPHAN: FIRST KILL

Orphan: First Kill, Paramount Players

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 18, 2022

A prequel to the 2009 mess of a horror movie Orphan feels like a terrible idea. The original, as some will recall, was an over-the-top, ridiculous tale about a particularly bad seed: a 9-year-old girl who was an expert in manipulation and murder. The most memorable element of the movie was its ultimate revelation, which must be revealed in a discussion of this 13-years-later follow-up.

Unlike the first movie, this one isn't messing around with a cheap, gimmicky twist. The straightforward frankness about the disturbing and demented nature of the main character is a major reason Orphan: First Kill works as both a diabolical thriller and, once its own underlying truth comes to light, a devious comedy.

There's no avoiding it, because screenwriter David Coggeshall doesn't try to hide it, so here's the truth about the title character: Leena, soon to be Esther, is not the young girl she appears to be. She's an adult woman, stricken with a glandular disorder that mostly stopped her body from developing past the age of 10. She's also a thief and, after her most recent con, a brutal killer.

All of that is disclosed within the first minutes of this film, set two years before the original, in an exposition-heavy monologue from a psychiatrist at the Estonian mental institution where the woman is a patient/prisoner. Knowing all of this from the start, it's far easier to accept the character's actions and behavior as believable, as well as to admire how Coggeshall turns Leena/Esther's con game into something even more distressing. A disturbed kid might not know any better, but an adult—especially one with no qualms about pretending to be an innocent child—does, which makes it all the creepier.

One of the technical challenges here is that the character is once again played by Isabelle Fuhrman, who has aged more than a decade since she originated the role as a pre-teen. The fictional reality of the character being an adult didn't entirely help the uncomfortable factual reality that a real child was participating in the original story's decidedly mature content (trying to seduce a grown man, for example), but that's obviously not an issue here.

No, the main trial is that director William Brent Bell has to convince us that an adult Fuhrmann still has the appearance of a character she played more than a decade ago, and with some obvious uses of body doubles and shots of Fuhrmann almost certainly standing on her knees, the effect is fine enough. It's the actor's performance that matters more, anyway, and with age and surely a bit more understanding of what this material is calling from her, Fuhrmann's take on the scheming and murderous woman pretending to be a kid comes across as far more wicked and calculating.

The story begins with a prologue, detailing how Leena escapes the institution (killing people as bad as a guard who fetishizes how she looks and as innocent as a caring therapist in the process) and developing a plan to be brought to the United States. Looking up a directory of missing children, Leena finds one, a young girl from Connecticut named Esther, who looks somewhat like a younger version of her own appearance. Yes, the character is that nefarious to exploit a family in emotional limbo for her own benefit, and yes, the film, more importantly, gets some sickening suspense out of seeing this game being played from the perspective of the new "Esther."

The grieving and now relieved family is made up of Tricia (Julia Stiles) and Allen (a plainly genuine Rossif Sutherland), as well as their college-bound son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan). Coggeshall's story seems to be one thing for a while, and it's familiar to the basic thrust of the first movie's plot (Esther tries to fit in with the family and become more intimate with her "father").

However, the change in perspective to Esther and the added dramatic irony—of knowing so much of what the family doesn't realize—gives the film a twisted bite that the original attempted, only for that movie's evasion tactics to render the exercise silly. Here, there's divided tension in the curiosity of how Esther could pull off her subterfuge and, for the sake of this family, of wanting the con artist to be caught—perhaps by a child therapist (played by Samantha Walkes), who notices something is off about the girl, or Detective Donnan (Hiro Kanagawa), who wants the story of Esther's disappearance.

Coggeshall, though, has his own game in mind here, and it turns the tables on Esther—both her circumstances and transforming her into an unexpected anti-hero—and the entire moral calculus of this tale. Basically, our cunning and killing protagonist gets an opponent as crafty and ruthless as she is—although there's a strong case that Esther's foe is far more morally compromised and worthy of comeuppance than even she is. This transforms the story from a slightly altered—but effective—variation on the original movie into a sly battle of wits. Without giving away anything specific, it also gives one cast member a fiendishly juicy role, which the actor relishes and precisely crafts.

There's dark humor here, too, although the reasons for that also can't be explained without giving away too much (The real villain's motive and attitude serve as a cutting takedown of a mentality that some refer to with a term suggesting a certain insect). All of those elements make Orphan: First Kill a wickedly clever game and a vast improvement on its predecessor.

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