ORPHAN: FIRST KILL (2022)

Studio:     Paramount Pictures
Director:    William Brent Bell
Writer:     David Coggeshall, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Alex Mace
Producer:  Alex Mace, Hal Sadoff, Ethan Erwin, James Tomlinson
Stars:     Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Matthew Finlan, Julia Stiles, Samantha Walkes, Dave Brown

Review Score:

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Summary:

After escaping a psychiatric facility, a homicidal woman whose dwarfism keeps her looking young worms her way into the lives of an American family by impersonating their missing daughter.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Leena, a murderous 30-year-old woman whose rare gland disorder causes her to look like a small child, escapes the Saarne Institute in Estonia in 2007 by killing several guards and an art therapy instructor. Using a missing persons database to find kids she resembles, Leena takes up the identity of Esther Albright, a 10-year-old girl who went missing four years earlier in Darien, Connecticut.

After learning from Detective Donnan, who investigated Esther’s disappearance, that she was supposedly found, Esther’s mother Tricia Albright travels to Moscow to bring Esther back home. Tricia takes Esther to see child psychologist Dr. Segar, who reports to Tricia that Esther appeared to be putting on a performance with lies to answer her questions. On her way out, Esther notices Donnan, whom she later identifies from a newspaper clipping about Esther’s disappearance, watching her.

Allen begins bonding with Esther over their shared love of painting, which never interested the real Esther. Tricia observes that Esther’s apparent return changed her husband for the better, as he is now more inspired with his artwork and more affectionate toward Tricia.

Detective Donnan interrupts the family’s dinner. Noticing that the detective appears suspicious of her, Esther plots to run away, but reconsiders when she gets the idea that she can seduce Allen into a romantic relationship.

Tricia and Allen prepare to attend a gala together. Esther jealously rips Tricia’s dress after she spies Tricia and Allen having sex.

Tricia and Allen leave Esther home alone with their 16-year-old son Gunnar. Gunnar hosts a backyard party for his friends. When Gunnar behaves brusquely toward her, Esther responds by talking back to him rudely.

Detective Donnan revisits the Albright home to secretly search Esther’s bedroom. Esther follows Donnan back to his house when she realizes he removed a record album for fingerprinting.

Tricia and Allen return home. Tricia takes the opportunity to search through a keepsake bible that Esther brought with her from Estonia. Tricia finds defaced family photos of her and Allen, an address for Detective Donnan, and a stamp identifying the Saarne Institute.

Back at his house, Detective Donnan verifies that the fingerprint lifted from the record does not match Esther’s. Esther suddenly starts stabbing Donnan repeatedly. Tricia unexpectedly enters and finishes off Donnan by shooting him.

Revealing she knew all along that Esther wasn’t her real daughter, Tricia confronts Esther about being a murderous dwarf who escaped a psychiatric facility. Since she could have robbed them and disappeared, Tricia speculates Esther has a larger scheme in mind, possibly one that involves killing the Albrights. Tricia confesses that Gunnar accidentally killed the real Esther with rough horseplay and she covered it up to protect their family. However, Esther’s apparent return reinvigorated her husband and Tricia doesn’t want to lose that. Through a mutually beneficial arrangement where they both have something to lose, Tricia compels Esther to continue her ruse and keep quiet. The two women throw Donnan’s body down the same well where Tricia disposed of the real Esther.

Tricia privately tells Gunnar what is really going on. Gunnar warns Esther against stepping out of line or questioning him.

Tricia coaches Esther on how to fool Dr. Segar as well as family friends. Later, Tricia gets confrontational with Esther when she realizes Esther remains determined to seduce Allen.

Tricia tries poisoning Esther, but Esther feeds the meal to a mouse that subsequently dies. Esther retaliates by tricking Tricia into sipping a smoothie containing the dead mouse.

Tricia, Gunnar, and Esther go to a train station to see Allen off on a business trip. Esther unsuccessfully attempts to push Tricia and Gunnar in front of a train. After Allen leaves, Tricia vows to kill Esther. Esther escapes in Tricia’s car, but Tricia calls a sympathetic police officer who pulls over Esther and returns her to the Albright mansion.

Tricia and Gunnar try to kill Esther and make it look like a suicide. Esther murders Gunnar. After accidentally starting a fire in the kitchen, a vicious fight between Tricia and Esther spills out onto the mansion’s roof.

Allen returns home to find the house in flames. With both women hanging onto the edge, Allen pulls Esther back up to the roof while Tricia falls to her death. Allen stumbles backward when he realizes from Tricia’s last words and Esther’s fake teeth that Esther is not his real daughter. Allen falls to his death.

Esther escapes the burning mansion. Dr. Segar makes plans to put up Esther for adoption.

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Review:

“Orphan” has one of the most memorable twists in horror history. In the 2009 thriller, grieving parents Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga adopt Esther, a Russian girl they believe to be only nine years old. As Esther wreaks homicidal havoc and crafts sinister psychological schemes, viewers are led to believe they’re watching a typical “killer kid” flick. The hitch is, Esther suffers from a rare form of dwarfism that keeps her looking like a child. She’s really a woman in her thirties who has her sights set on seducing her foster father and slaughtering everyone else in the family. How’s that for melodramatically macabre?

“Orphan: First Kill,” a prequel set in 2007, has its hands full with trying to top that twist. Improbably, it comes close; some might even say it succeeds. Embracing its origins in B-movie madness, “First Kill” wisely chooses to throw reality to the wind by becoming kooky entertainment akin to a carnival sideshow that just wants to wow an audience gawking in stunned disbelief.

Isabelle Fuhrman returns to the role that made her and Esther inextricably iconic as a unique villainess, one of the few such female figures in fright films. Any article on the movie’s making will tell you that director William Brent Bell and his creative collaborators opted not to do any de-aging tricks via CGI. Instead, they try passing off Fuhrman as Esther through purely practical techniques. This means staging scenes similarly to how “The Lord of the Rings” filmed the hobbits. The camera uses forced perspective to capture angles meant to make Fuhrman look like she’s three feet tall. Actual children then double as her stand-ins for behind-the-back shots where Fuhrman’s face isn’t seen. It looks goofy as all get out, but that ends up being part of the fun.

Born in 1997, Isabelle Fuhrman was right around Esther’s supposed age when the original “Orphan” went in front of a camera. Now that it’s roughly 15 years later, Fuhrman doesn’t remotely pass for age ten anymore. Nevertheless, I admire the courageous disregard displayed by the filmmakers to go for it anyway. They knew their ruse wouldn’t be entirely successful, but they also knew it wouldn’t really matter. They simply trusted a game audience to willingly suspend copious disbelief. That’s because Fuhrman is Esther as much as Robert Englund is Freddy Krueger, and “First Kill” is all about throwing things back to being wickedly weird the way theatrical thrillers often were in the aughts.

By using her childlike charms on a lusting security guard, unleashing another inmate to go medieval on another guard, and manipulating an art therapy instructor who was in over her head, Leena orchestrates a blood-soaked escape from an Estonian mental institution over “Orphan: First Kill’s” first 15 minutes. How does she get the name Esther? In a devilishly devious move that’s as sick as they get, Leena scours a missing persons database in search of kids she might resemble. Leena settles on Esther Albright, a little girl from Connecticut who disappeared four years ago, but would now be ten. Posing as their missing daughter, Leena makes it to America where “Esther” is awkwardly welcomed back home by her shocked parents Tricia and Allen and big brother Gunnar.

Clues quickly start coming together that something isn’t quite right, thanks to everyone having some oddly intuitive observations. I can’t imagine a father would be too surprised that his 10-year-old daughter has different interests than she did when she was six, but that’s how Allen reacts when Esther expresses a newfound interest in painting. It also doesn’t seem suspicious that Esther would mistake a child psychologist’s parrot as the same one from four years ago. After all, she was supposedly kidnapped and has been living in Eastern Europe all that time. She’s really expected to keep a space in her brain to remember the color of an office pet she probably only spent a few minutes with?

Just when it seems like Esther only appears intent on setting up the same surreptitious usurpation of this family like she’d inflict on Sarsgaard and Farmiga two years later in “Orphan,” “First Kill” hits its 55-minute mark. That’s when the script gets flipped, as the saying goes, and the film takes a turn that would make Pinocchio’s nose grow five feet long if he tried to claim he saw it coming.

What’s terrific about “Orphan: First Kill’s” twist is how it upends the power dynamic that had been constant from the first movie up through this point. The revelation turns the tables to put Esther on her heels when she’d previously been the one holding all the wild cards that kept her the chip leader. Suddenly, she has to start playing from behind, and it’s an uncomfortable position that neither Esther nor the audience is used to seeing her have to squirm out of.

The pivot isn’t an M. Night Shyamalan mind-blower by any means, although it provides enough octane to rev “Orphan: First Kill’s” engine so it can race through the last leg of the runtime. The guessing game regarding exactly how everything will pan out keeps suspense high and engagement higher, and that’s no small feat when we’re talking about a prequel whose ending we largely know given how the first film starts out.

Squeezing out a third installment before Isabelle Fuhrman truly becomes too old to play Esther seems like an impossible proposition, unless de-aging effects hit a price point that straight-to-streaming genre fare can afford. In the meantime, anyone who liked “Orphan” enough to want to see the character’s earlier antics should have that itch furiously scratched by “Orphan: First Kill.” Those familiar with the first film should also know what brand of bizarre this budding franchise brings, and should have no trouble adjusting their antennas for enjoyably amusing absurdity.

Review Score: 70

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