Orphan: First Kill

Spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen Orphan then the strong advice is to do so. It’s a very good film and the plot twist in it is necessarily mentioned early on in this prequel. This review won’t give anything away from a film that was made in 2009 but again by necessity the plot has to be discussed here though with no spoilers.

So with Orphan: First Kill we find Lena (Isabelle Fuhrman) in an asylum in Estonia plotting and manipulating a way to escape having been committed for life. And she does kill her new shrink on the way leaving the viewer in no doubt as to her state of mind.

Some basic online research turns up a missing person case and changing her name to Esther, Lena convinces the Albright family mother Trisha (Julia Stiles), father Allen (Rossif Sutherland) and son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) that she has come back, though with little details of where she’s been other than she now has an accent, and is a prodigy on the piano and a fine artist.

Her psychiatric sessions concern Dr Segar (Samantha Walkes) and there’s more than a hint of suspicion from the off by Gunnar. They don’t get along at all, and there’s little nuances that niggle the family that is put down to her absence and whatever it was she went through.

The only one who truly embraces her return in Allen who is taken by her conversion to painting and teaching her the techniques that will play such a powerful role in the first film. However a mid-film plot twist ramps up the intrigue, body count and general weirdness of it all.

This is a hugely enjoyable mix of the psychological and physical horror from director William Brent Bell with the cast pulling together into what becomes in its later stages EC comics style hokum. Fuhrman returning after so many years is astonishing in a performance that is on par with the first and also relishing the freedom that the original’s twist gives her.

This is drawn on by writer David Coggleshall so the viewer gets a rounded picture of Lena/Esther’s character. This wouldn’t work without the rest of the cast who are well up to the job once we hit the second to third acts when things really start to get running while bordering on the bonkers.

The set pieces are excellent and there’s plenty of stabby gore here too. It also takes a darkly comic turn (a la Whatever Happened to Baby Jane) which is an obvious progression once the absurdity of it all starts to bake in.