‘The Albrights have been here since the Mayflower arrived…’
The first Orphan movie was fairly well received without really making waves outside of horror circles. If ever there was a time to make a sequel to that film, it was in the intervening couple of years after it was released. Over ten years later with no clamour whatsoever is not the one. And as expected, Orphan: First Kill never really threatens to justify its own existence…
Leena (Isabelle Fuhrman) escapes from an Estonian psychiatric facility and embeds herself into an all-American family by pretending to be Esther – a missing child. Her ‘parents’ Allen (Rossif Sutherland) and Tricia (Julia Stiles) are both initially taken in by Leena’s uncanny impersonation of their daughter until Tricia starts to suspect something.
I will start by saying it’s great to see Julia Stiles onscreen and she is without a doubt the best thing about this film. Her codeswitching between loving mother and murderous she-wolf is a sight to behold, and her sparring with Fuhrman is pretty much all this film has got. The whole point of the source material was that the twist was so bonkers that it made the whole film more impactful as a result. Robbed of that twist, Orphan: First Kill trudges to its forgettable conclusion with a ridiculous plot and characters who are all uniformly terrible people meaning that there is nobody to root for. The other issue here is that for a horror film with designs to be a slasher, William Brent Bell’s prequel is neither frightening nor shocking. We have seen all this stuff many times before.
If there is anyone out there that really loved Orphan, there is probably enough here to justify a one-off viewing, Stiles’ performance alone probably just about justifies the entrance fee, but ultimately there is no real need for this film to exist.