Film Review: Orphan: First Kill
Paramount Players
(This review contains spoilers)
Orphan: First Kill is a prequel follow-up to 2009’s supremely excellent Orphan, in which an adopted girl turns out to be a serial killer with hypopituitarism, a rare hormonal disorder that has stunted her physical growth. At the time, it was an clever twist on the creepy child trope that benefited from superb directing and a tight script. This time around William Brent Bell (The Boy, The Devil Inside) takes the directorial reins from the underrated Jaume Collet-Serra to create a film which is tonally and cinematically different from the original, yet retains a bit of what made that film so special. Isabelle Fuhrman returns in the lead role as the vicious and intelligent Leena Klammer, known as Esther to her adoptive parents.
It's been a number of years since I saw the first installment, but even so I would easily place it within the top twenty horror films of the last two decades. Orphan possessed a dark subtlety which permeated all the space you weren’t watching up until the film’s big reveal. You won’t find that same suffocating dread here; First Kill presumes you’ve seen the forerunner and know that Esther/Leena is more than what she appears, and it rips off the mask by opening with a Michael Myers-style escape from Leena’s mental hospital where she smashes security guard skulls, tire-irons art teachers, and uses other mental patients as though they were attack dogs. It’s over-the-top, the violence and gore are embellished and tawdry, but it lays out its cards and lets the viewer know that we’re playing a very different game this time around.
I did experience an inkling of disappointment initially, not because the film did its prologue poorly, but because it was doing something far more conventional and familiar than the original, which if you watched without spoilers led you down a very enticing path. Here we’re getting viciousness and violence at the hands of a girl we know is much more than she looks and it’s all fine. Not amazing, but fine. Thankfully, the rest of the film didn’t play out on this course, and Orphan: First Kill takes a decidedly upward trajectory as it works toward its conclusion.
In this case the highly-intelligent and manipulative Leena escapes the Saarne Institute and commandeers the identity of Esther Albright, a American girl who went missing in Eastern Europe some four years earlier. There’s a series of title cards as we zoom from Estonia, to Connecticut, to Moscow, back to Connecticut where Leena, now Esther Albright, is reunited with her American family. Their New England mansion is so absurdly large and expensive that you can almost hear Bernie Sanders grumbling about it from a few hills over. There’s the floppy-haired teenage son, Gunner, who has a suitably appropriate rich boy hobby of fencing, and his parents Allen and Tricia, an artist and art-adjacent socialite. Julia Stiles plays the latter, and this immediately puts Orphan: First Kill on a higher tier than it perhaps deserves at this point in the film.
Paramount Players
The family is casually suspicious of Esther’s new accent, her strange clothes, her inexplicable memory gaps and unwillingness to talk about where she has been, and this leg of the movie tested the limits of believability for me at more than one instance. Why does her family not pry harder at where their child has been for the last four years? Why is there no discussion of old memories? Esther would have been at least five at the time of her disappearance, and that’s surely enough time to have a few codified memories to revisit. Yet her family regards her mysterious return with docile acceptance. The only fly in the ointment is Detective Donnan, the presumed chief inspector on Esther’s missing persons case. This Dr. Loomis-like figure insists on dropping in for dinner, asking probing questions, and doing all of the things a normal family would do if their child suddenly returned. It’s a trope I don’t mind in horror, and Hiro Kanagawa gives the role all it deserves.
To make matters worse, Leena (remember, actually an adult woman) develops an attraction toward Allen, understood by the wider world to be her father. The two spend several scenes in his painting studio, where is continually impressed by his daughter’s newfound talents. In time, they move to collaborative efforts, and this is where the film resurrects one of the more humanizing elements of Leena from the first film: her unfulfilled and completely natural desire for consensual sexuality. Seeing as she effectively looks like a child, she’s only ever been viewed as as sexual being by predators and deviants, something touched on in the prologue. I found immediate sympathy for both her and the distraight Allen, who was far more deeply affected by Esther’s disappearance than either his wife or son.
At this point I’m starting to think Orphan: First Kill is ultimately going to be a crap film. We’re going to get some gory kills, Leena will eventually fall out of her infatuation with Allen, it will all end in tears, and possibly that ornate and prodigious mansion burning to the ground. After all, the film hasn’t done anything to spark us just yet, happy to phone-in most of the details and keep all the pieces moving on predictable paths.
Boy, was I wrong and glad for it. I overlooked that this film was written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, who while may not be the slickest screenwriter in horror, at least doesn’t do boring or predictable things, generally speaking.
As you probably guessed, from here on there be spoilers, so go watch the film before you continue if you care to.
Paramount Players
With Detective Donnan closing in on her, going so far as to steal a record that has Leena’s fingerprints, our diminutive protagonist (calling her this because I feel bad for her and the other people in this story are shit) goes on the offensive, following Donnan to his home and murdering him. Where the film gets interesting is that she is followed there by Tricia (Julia Stiles, if you forgot), who helps finish off the detective after Leena wounds him. At first, I presumed this was some weirdly psychotic motherly instinct playing out, but it turns out that Tricia knows that Esther isn’t really Esther, and has been keyed into that detail since she received the phone call from Russia claiming that her daughter had been found.
At this juncture, the film finds new life, imbued with the wonderful energy a viewer feels when their expectations have been subverted.
See, Tricia knows Esther can’t have returned because the real Esther is dead. Trica helped bury her after golden boy Gunner was ‘too rough’ with his sister. This is why she hasn’t asked too many questions, and why she doesn’t want anyone else to. As far as she’s concerned, she and Leena are now in a contract–the interloper will play the role of loving daughter to keep her breadwinner husband sane, or Tricia will expose her. This also explains why both she and Gunner kept their distance from Esther earlier in the film, and why they asked so few questions.
I know it’s not cool to like anything about horror movies anymore, but this was a stroke close to brilliance, and a great way to reinvent the plotlines of the original film. We’re not used to seeing the killer put on their heels, let alone for days at a time before everything catches fire, but this shift in dynamic brought new life to a film that was otherwise circling the drain. All at once I sat up in my living room, eager to see how this would play out. They’d manage to replicate a revelation on par with the first movie, and that deserves applause. To make this even more effective, Julia Stiles is incredibly good at being a bitch in movies, and the choice of casting her as Tricia now seems like more than just grabbing the biggest name of yesteryear.
The eventual finale plays out in gory fashion, with Leena playing out a chess game against Tricia and Gunner until it all comes crashing down as each side is pushed too far. Unfortunately for the Albrights, when you’re playing a game to the death with a seasoned serial killer, you’re not going to come out on top. The final result is a fun, if imbalanced film that could have used a little more attention in the set up. Horror hasn’t had a great couple of years, and while it’s not the monsoon we pray that the dark gods grant us, Orphan: First Kill was a pleasant rain, a great reason to revisit the first film, and a worthwhile watch in itself.
Verdict: 7/10
Strengths
Creative twist on par with the original
Julia Stiles and Isabelle Fuhrman are awesome
Doesn’t take itself too seriously
Weaknesses
Limited creativity in the peripheral elements of the film
Ultimately inferior to its predecessor (probably unavoidable)
You may also like: Orphan, Sinister, The Conjuring 2
