Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2009 horror Orphan may have lifted its premise from a Batman: The Animated Series episode (‘Baby-Doll’), but then-ten-year-old actor Isabelle Fuhrman was terrific as Esther, a (SPOILER WARNING!) 30-year-old homicidal maniac whose growth-arresting medical condition allows her to pass for a child. Without being exactly good, Orphan was terribly entertaining — and Esther earned a spot in the modern horror pantheon alongside Annabelle the Doll, Gabriel the Malignant and Brahms the Boy.
This long-delayed follow-up is a better, weirder film — deploying CGI, body-doubling and trick camera angles so the indispensable Fuhrman can do a José Ferrer-as-Toulouse Lautrec act and reprise her signature role. Cuckoo-in-the-nest porcelain doll Esther is still deliciously wrong; here, a foster brother (Matthew Finlan) complains she dresses like Lizzie Borden, famously tried (if acquitted) for murder in 1893. Cannily, Orphan: First Kill draws from the 2012 documentary The Imposter, about a real-life case where a young-looking French man tried with surprising success to pass himself off as the long-lost son of an American family.
Julia Stiles is inspired casting as Allen's surprisingly tough wife.
After a Lecter-style asylum escape, Leena (Esther’s real name) checks online accounts of missing girls and selects the one she can most easily pass for, which delivers the murderous but tragic waif to the gothic mansion of artist Allen Albright (Rossif Sutherland). Julia Stiles is inspired casting as Allen’s surprisingly tough wife — she has form dealing with killer tykes in the remake of The Omen and is a rare blonde leading-lady type with hidden steel. Evoking the 1963 Hammer film Paranoiac, the ostensible villain has to turn detective. Leena wonders why some members of the family eagerly accept her as the lost daughter while others seethe with hostility.
Directed by William Brent Bell, of the Boy movies and the underrated Wer, Orphan: First Kill defaults to horror sequelage as Esther has to murder someone every 15 minutes or so, but Fuhrman’s peculiarly calm malice remains fresh.
