Review | Orphan: First Kill movie review – Isabelle Fuhrman returns as Esther in belated prequel to 2009 horror hit
- Isabelle Fuhrman’s character Esther escapes from captivity in Estonia and pretends to be the long-lost daughter of a US family
- Despite riveting performances from Fuhrman and Julia Stiles, who plays her ‘mother’, the film doesn’t progress beyond a gruesome psycho-horror
2.5/5 stars
It’s time for Esther to get her origin story. Orphan: First Kill is a belated prequel to 2009’s Orphan, the horrifying story of a not-so-innocent adoptee starring Isabelle Fuhrman.
As the first film explained, Fuhrman’s Esther is not a nine-year-old girl despite her appearance. She’s in fact a woman in her 30s, Leena Klammer, afflicted with a rare hormonal disorder that stunted her growth. She is also psychotic and spent her early years in Estonia in an institution – until she escaped.
In its bloody opening, William Brent Bell’s new film depicts Esther/Leena’s flight from her snowbound Estonian prison, in which she seduces a guard before beating him to death.
Soon this “exceptional con artist” is looking up the identities of missing children, deciding which one she resembles. Before long she is on a private jet to the United States to be reunited with her “family” in Connecticut: father Allen (Rossif Sutherland), mother Tricia (Julia Stiles) and brother Gunnar (Matthew Finlan).
Based on a story by Alex Mace and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, who scripted the original film, the set-up may have you wondering why the wealthy Albright family seem to readily buy into this oddball girl with a strange accent as their long-lost daughter. Especially when she makes obvious mistakes, like not recalling her own grandmother’s death.