Paramount+
Orphan’s lesson to women was that you should never adopt a foreign-born child over the age of 7 because they might secretly be an adult in an adolescent’s body who wants to slaughter your biological offspring and seduce your husband. Jaume Collet-Serra’s modern riff on The Bad Seed was a fright-free affair defined mainly by its absurdity and, also, by Isabelle Fuhrman’s lead performance as Esther, a Russian girl who was actually a 33-year-old woman from Estonia with a rare hormone disorder that caused “proportional dwarfism.” Esther was adopted by a couple (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) with a deaf daughter and an angry son who were also grieving the recent death of an unborn girl. Given her creepy expressions and equally off-putting outfits—think turn-of-the-century dolls’ clothes with ribbons covering her neck and wrist scars—Esther unsurprisingly made their lives a living hell, surreptitiously murdering and maiming anyone who rubbed her the wrong way.
Though Esther perished at the end of that 2009 film, her backstory is now mined for derivative terror in Orphan: First Kill, a prequel (Aug. 19 in theaters, On Demand and Paramount+) so fundamentally misbegotten as to be unintentionally (and inevitably) hilarious. Whereas the original Orphan hinged on the twist that its youthful star was playing a secret grown-up, William Brent Bell’s lousy follow-up—which is set two years before its predecessor—reverses this illusion, featuring the now-25-year-old Fuhrman as young-looking Esther. Think of it as the horror version of Clifford, orchestrated via lots of close-ups that position Fuhrman’s face at the bottom of the frame (to better suggest her shortness), and routine use of body doubles (who are seen only from the rear) for any master shots. The effort exerted to pull off this ruse is both considerable and transparent, turning the entire affair into a weird stunt—a situation exacerbated by the fact that, no matter the makeup used to de-age Fuhrman, she no longer has the visage of a 10-year-old.
So ludicrous are Orphan: First Kill’s attempts at positing its leading lady as a child that one wishes the filmmakers had gone the What We Do in the Shadows route and simply CGI’d her head onto a little body. Alas, as it stands, Bell’s saga feigns seriousness while indulging in ridiculousness. David Coggeshall’s script is a dramatization of the tale recounted in the first movie, beginning with Esther—who at this early stage is still going by her birth name Lena—living in Estonia’s Saarne Institute. She’s the psychiatric facility’s most dangerous resident, and it doesn’t take long for her to murderously escape to Russia, where she scours the internet for missing persons reports and chooses Esther Albright, an American, because they resemble each other. When Esther’s wealthy Darien, Connecticut parents Tricia (Julia Stiles) and Allen (Rossif Sutherland) hear that their girl has been discovered after all these years, they’re astonished, as is their teenage son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan), and a reunion is swiftly arranged.