The last time we saw Esther – the child mascarading psycho from 2009’s Orphan – she was sinking to the bottom of a frozen lake after getting her neck snapped from a mule-kick from Vera Farmiga. However, even if this was the end for a truly original horror villain, movie rules dictate that she’s got at least one more appearance still in her even if she is dead; and so thirteen years after the first Orphan, we get First Kill, a prequel detailing Esther/Leena’s initial escape from the Saarne Institute in Estonia and the first time she latched onto a family who have no idea that her ten year-old look hides a thirty year-old psycho with hypopituitarism.
However, if I’m being honest, while I appreciated the original Orphan despite having that wild twist spoiled, the prospect of an Esther prequel thirteen years after the fact felt about as necessary as a fifth leg on a Grand National winner – I mean, how was anyone supposed to follow up that twist. Well, against all odds, Orphan: First Kill somehow comes pretty damn close.
The year is 2007 and years before the Colemans make their fateful choice to adopt, we find the diminutive, thirtysomething dynamo known as Leena Klammer languishing in a cell at the Saarne Institute, plotting her ass off to mount an escape. The opportunity soon presents itself when a brand new art therapist starts at the Estonian psychiatric unit that gives the little monster the opportunity she’s been waiting for to make a bloody break for it; but after obtaining freedom, what does someone like Leena do next? Where does she go?
The answer is whipping up a truly fiendish plan that’ll get her ultimately shipped over to America and into the arms of a grateful family when she goes online and searches for missing children who she can convincingly resemble. She finds it in the face of Esther Albright, the young daughter of a wealthy family who went missing back in 2003 and after alerting the authorities and claiming that she is Esther and she’s finally escaped from her captors, she is soon whisked off to Darien, Connecticut to be reunited with her “family”.
It seems that the disappearance of little Esther had caused quite the rift to form within the Albright clan, with artist father Allen taking the loss especially hard, but now she’s “back”, mother Tricia and brother Gunner now seemingly have a chance to heal – or at least they would if their daughter wasn’t an imposter who is pulling every trick in the book to remain undiscovered. However, it wouldn’t be an Orphan movie without some sort of delusional twist and soon we find that things are truly not what they seem and that Leena has stumbled into something far more complex than a snooping detective or a probing therapist.
How much you ultimately get out of Orphan: First Kill will probably depend on how merciful you’re willing to be that such a tricky film as the original Orphan somehow managed to wrangle a prequel. For a start, prequels are tricky fuckers to pull off to start with, especially as the most memorable aspect of the original film was that spectacular, outlandish and wonderfully twisted reveal. Obviously, the cat is long out of the bag now, but beyond a missing surprise factor, First Kill also has to try and convincingly have Isabelle Fuhrman still portray the baby-faced infiltrator despite plainly looking thirteen years older. To the credit of the actress, she’s still obviously relishing her role and attacks it with all the conniving glee she did back in 2009, but it soon becomes something of a running joke about how hard the movie is trying to keep up the illusion that this now twenty-four year-old was can convincingly pass for ten. Make up, camera angles and more body doubling than the entire Lord Of The Rings trilogy is employed to try and maintain the failing subterfuge, but with a judicial use of your imagination (and a fair bit of good will), it’s fun to play along, even if the frequent cuts to and actual child for long shots is sometimes unintentionally amusing.
But enough of taking cheap shots are the obvious shortcomings of waiting thirteen years to make a prequel, does Orphan: First Kill manage to justify its rather unnecessary existence? Actually, it kinda does by taking something of a strange route and by what I mean by that is the film takes a huge amount of inspiration from the jaw-dropping documentary, The Imposter which told the story of shameless con artist Frederic Bourdin who managed to trick a Texan family that he was their missing son and, better yet, actually expands on some of the theories that get brought up in Bart Layton’s extraordinary 20012 film. As a source of inspiration, director William Brent Bell (The Boy) couldn’t have hoped to get a better concept to riff on and better yet, some of the unanswered questions from the doc actually gives the screenwriters the chance to pull off yet another ballsy, outlandish twist that sparks life into the thing just as its losing steam.
For the first half of the film, we follow Fuhrman’s villain from her escape from the Saarne Institute to watching her worm her way into the bosom of the Albright family and while it’s initially strange to make Leena/Esther the main character, it turns out that those wily filmmakers are planning something crazy. Now, in my review for the first Orphan, I complained that the impact of the film was severely lessened due to me discovering the twist before the fact. But to really do First Kill justice I’m going to have to drop some spoilers, so if you are yet to witness it, now would be a good time to drop out.
It turns out that while poor old Allen (Possessor’s Rossif Sutherland) is utterly clueless, son Gunner is the reason the original Esther “disappeared” in the first place, and as a result, cold blooded matriarch Tricia (played by a game Julia Stiles) has covered the whole thing up to protect both her son and the family name. As a result, it means that both the Albrights and a caught-out Leena now have to play happy families despite each side knowing that the other is desperate to kill them without a second thought. As a result, it manages to infuse the prequel with enough unpredictable energy to force it to the end even if the film is noticably running on fumes by the time the credits roll and the chaotic drama also manages to wallpaper over a lot of cracks such odd pacing issues, some iffy visual effects in the climax and the fact that we now have to treat Esther as an anti-hero for some reason.
With all that being said, the fact that Orphan manages to switch itself from a killer child thriller to a weird, messed-up, class war blow out with a deranged child-woman matching wits with evil rich people, is nothing short of impressive. Sure, there’s a bunch of storytelling problems that come with it, but the true gauge of success here is that I’m not flinching at the news that a third Orphan movie is on the cards – even if Isabelle Fuhrman is rapidly approaching Esther’s actual age…
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