Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan was an elegantly trashy and well-acted contribution to the canon of movies about evil children. And it’s perhaps most notable for its great last-act twist, wherein it’s revealed that the nine-year-old Esther (played by Isabelle Fuhrman), who’s adopted by a couple after the death of their unborn child, isn’t a little girl at all, but rather a murderous 33-year-old Estonian woman named Leena Klanner. Unfortunately, Orphan: First Kill turns this outrageous plot development, which was succinctly conveyed in the first film through one expository phone call from Leena’s former doctor, into a dreary legacy prequel, devoid of any mystery, thrills, or reason for existing beyond mere fan service.
First Kill begins two years before the events of the first film in an Estonian mental asylum, where a Dr. Novotny (David Lawrence Brown) refreshes our memories by telling a visiting art therapy teacher (Gwendolyn Collins) about how Leena is their most dangerous patient. But this warning doesn’t seem to be passed on to the security guards, given how readily, if illogically, Leena escapes from the institute. In order to flee the country, Leena promptly impersonates a missing American child named Esther Albright, somehow raising no suspicions from local authorities. She’s then quickly welcomed into the bourgeois home of Tricia (Julia Stiles) and Allen Albright (Rossif Sutherland), so overjoyed by the return of their long-lost daughter that they’re willing to overlook her newly acquired accent and artistic prowess.
From here, First Kill plays out much in the same way that the first film does, with Esther/Leena steadily pitting mother, father, and teenage son, Gunnar (Matthew Finlan), against each other and intermittently offing any interlopers who get in the way. But the film, sans any mystery for the audience surrounding Esther’s identity, plays out as a banal retread with lame callbacks interspersed throughout. (Esther’s black-light painting technique, for instance, is introduced to her by Allen, a renowned artist, as he transparently states, “I resorted to a hidden layer. Nothing is ever just one thing, right?”) Even when First Kill springs its own mildly intriguing twist around the midpoint, attempting to position Esther as a kind of avenging anti-hero, the moment ultimately drags the film down to a level of strange disinterest.
Elsewhere, the film’s distinctly VOD-grade aesthetic feels like a very distant cousin of Jeff Cutter’s gorgeously wintry compositions for the first Orphan. But perhaps the biggest disappointment of all is that Fuhrman’s performance as Esther, so wonderfully unsettling and integral to the shock value of the original, now comes off as utterly misguided. First Kill strains to recreate the actor’s credible similarity to a nine-year-old in the first film through makeup and child body doubles, but the effort is for naught, as Fuhrman unmistakably looks like her 25-year-old self, and to sometimes unintentionally comedic effect. It all serves to prove that the original Orphan’s success was simply a case of catching lightning in a bottle, and that not every horror concept has the potential to be franchised.
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