In 2009, cinema audiences were introduced to vicious pint-sized 9-year-old psychopathic serial killer Esther in Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan. Towards the end of the film we learned, in the film’s agreeable twist, that Esther wasn’t actually 9 years old (and wasn’t even called Esther) but was in actual fact Leena Klammer, a 33-year-old Estonian woman suffering from a rare disorder that has stunted her physical growth and that she has spent her life posing as a young girl. 13 years later and here comes the sequel – or rather, the prequel – in the shape of Orphan First Kill, set in 2007 and offering up an explanation as to how Leena became known as Esther and a murderous exploit she became involved with before the events of the first film. If you’re worried that the film’s USP was blown out of the water by the reveal of Esther/Leena’s condition in the first film then don’t worry; First Kill delivers a doozy of a twist some forty minutes into its running time that sends the film spinning off into an entirely different direction and of course, we’re not going to spoil it here.
As the film begins we’re at the Saarne Institute in Estonia where Leena engineers an escape by hiding in the car of visiting art therapist Anna Troyev (Gwendoline Collins). Later accessing the internet Leena matches herself physically with an American missing girl called Esther Albright and is soon “reunited” with the wealthy Albright family in Connecticut. The family have come to terms with the loss of their daughter but the girl’s mother Tricia (Julia Stiles) quickly suspects that something isn’t quite right as there are certain facts about the family that Esther seems to have no memory of and she is now displaying a previously unexpressed interest in painting, an interest that brings her creepily close to her “father” Allen (Rossif Sutherland). Tricia and the couple’s son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) have their own reasons to be suspicious of Esther…
Orphan First Kill is quite bonkers in so many ways but it’s hugely entertaining. The new twist is glorious, utterly wrong-footing both its audience and Esther (played again by Isabelle Fuhrman who was ten when the first film was made) and the melodrama that plays out is positively Gothic in its unashamed high-camp absurdity. Director William Brent Bell (whose CV includes the largely-execrable The Boy movies) deftly works his way through the unlikely twists and turns of the plot and there are, horror hounds will be pleased to learn, a couple of wince-inducing moments of gore and violence and an ending that borders on the hysterical. Yet it all seems to work and hang together despite some gaping plot holes and inconsistencies because everyone is taking it all terribly seriously and they’re all obviously well aware that they’re playing in a very heightened horror sandbox. The underrated Stiles is brilliant as Tricia but the real star here, as in the first film, is Fuhrman and the film cleverly recreates the young character with the same, older actress over a decade later not with dodgy CGI or digital de-ageing but by using well-placed body doubles and utilising forced perspective in certain sequences. Orphan First Kill doesn’t especially benefit from the 4K format; it’s a dark, sepia-tinged movie and not exactly bursting with colour and the only special feature is a perfunctory 2-minute Electronic Press Kit ‘making of.’ If you can turn off your critical faculties and let yourself be swept away by Orphan First Kill’s idiocy (and its own giddily-unexpected twist) you’ll surely find that this is a bracingly-enjoyable 99 minutes of hoary horror hokum.
Orphan First Kill is available now on 4K and Blu-ray
