Movie Review: ORPHAN: FIRST KILL

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: August 19th, 2022 / 11:33 AM

ORPHAN: FIRST KILL | ©2022 Paramount Players

Stars: Isabelle Fuhrman, Julia Stiles, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Matthew Finlan, Gwendolyn Collins
Writer: David Coggeshall, story by Alex Mace and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Director: William Brent Bell
Distributor: Paramount Players
Release Date: August 19, 2022

ORPHAN: FIRST KILL has a title that seems a bit of a misnomer. By the time we meet, or rather are reacquainted with, Lena/Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), she seems to have already racked up a body count.

For those unfamiliar with “Esther,” she is the title character in 2009’s ORPHAN. The new ORPHAN: FIRST KILL is a prequel to that.

ORPHAN: FIRST KILL begins at a mental institution in 2007 Estonia. Art therapist Anna (Gwendolyn Collins) comes in for her first day of work. She is warned about the asylum’s most dangerous inmate, Lena.

This upfront caution reveals the big secret of ORPHAN, so spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen the earlier film. Lena (known in ORPHAN and most of ORPHAN: FIRST KILL as Esther) looks like a little girl, but is actually an adult woman. She’s also extremely manipulative and capable of enormous violence.

Pretty quickly, Lena escapes from the psychiatric facility (demonstrating both her manipulative and violent sides). She gets hold of a computer and starts looking for missing children who resemble her. She finds information about Esther Albright, the daughter of a wealthy American family, who vanished four years ago.

The Russian police alert Esther’s family that they’ve found their missing nine-year-old. Mom Tricia (Julia Stiles) travels to Russia to retrieve Esther and bring her home to the Albright mansion. Artist Dad Allen (Rossif Sutherland) is overjoyed to see Esther, accepting any differences in her as understandable changes due to both age and whatever she’s been through. Teen brother Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) is a little less effusive, but he is a rich adolescent boy who is preoccupied with himself, so that’s to be expected.

For a while, it seems obvious where ORPHAN: FIRST KILL is going, especially since viewers of ORPHAN know how that film started. But at the fifty-minute mark, there is a huge plot twist that makes us lean forward. We still know what has to happen, but suddenly, we’re very interested in how exactly ORPHAN: FIRST KILL will unspool.

The screenplay by David Coggeshall, from a story by Alex Mace and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (both of whom wrote on the original ORPHAN) is pretty clever, answering some of our initial questions. It also takes care to answer questions that will occur to most people at the start.

Director William Brent Bell has fun with the opulent surroundings, the artistic aspects of both Allen and Esther, and the bursts of ferocity. He’s also good with the actors, keeping things more in the realm of suspense than of camp.

ORPHAN: FIRST KILL has one huge problem at its center, though, and it cannot be surmounted by the VFX available here. When 2009’s ORPHAN was shot, Furhman was in reality eleven years old, playing a character everyone around her assumed to be ten. Fuhrman is now age twenty-five.

Although the ORPHAN: FIRST KILL VFX persuasively makes her diminutive when Fuhrman is in frame with other characters, and she can pass for a teenager, her face is not that of a nine-year-old. It’s just about this side of plausibility that one grief-stricken relative, desperate for a miracle, might buy it. That everybody else also thinks she’s a child requires more suspension of disbelief than can be mustered.

This is not Fuhrman’s fault. She makes strong performance choices, and plays “young” without overdoing it. She’s also fine with Esther’s physically powerful, psychotic side.

Despite Fuhrman’s skill, ORPHAN: FIRST KILL would have worked better if the role had been recast with an actual preteen. As it is, the movie is worth seeing for where it goes, but we have to be prepared to do a lot of pretending we’re not seeing what we’re seeing in order to get there.

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