The Return of Isabelle Fuhrman as Esther, the Pretend Child Psycho, in an Even More Utterly ridiculous Prequel to 'Orphan: First Kill'
Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), the demon child of the 2009 horror thriller "Orphan," was a 9-year-old psycho freak who dressed like a frumpy Victorian doll and spoke in a Russian accent, turning up the heat on her malevolence by making her appear not just a junior devil but a junior devil from Putin's land. Monster children movies have a long history (the first, "The Bad Seed," was released in 1956), and after "The Omen," "The Brood," "Ringu," and so many others, there wasn't much room for a pulp horror film like "Orphan" to surprise us. But, in its pulpy bazooka way, the film did have an original twist: Esther was not, in fact, nine years old; she was Leena, a woman in her early thirties with a rare hormonal disorder that stunted her physical development. The blunder of "Orphan" was that it wasn't much different from the film it would have been if Esther had just been 9 years old. If the adult-woman-in-a-child's-body horror concept is to be successful, it must be executed with psychology, imagination, and flair, all of which "Orphan" lacked.
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Most critics, including myself, thought it was a fail, but it has since become a cult classic. Thus, 13 years later, comes "Orphan: First Kill," a prequel to "Orphan," in which Fuhrman, who was only 11 at the time the first film was shot, is now a grown-up actor playing a child.
She's got the same look: the pigtails tied with ribbon, the choker and ruffled 19th-century shirt, and the dour Slavic demeanor, as if she were playing Irina in a skewed version of "Three Sisters." "First Kill" begins with her breaking out of the Saarne psychiatric facility in Estonia, where she discovers and adopts, via the Internet, the image and identity of Esther (Julia Stiles and Rossif Sutherland). Esther vanished four years ago and has never been found, with the assumption that she was abducted.
The Albrights are a wealthy coastal family who fly around in private jets and live in a mansion in Darien, Conn., where Allen is a well-known painter and Tricia is a socialite who works the charity circuit. When Esther appears with a Russian accent she didn't have before and a completely different personality, it's assumed that her years in captivity simply changed her. For a while, the film appears to stretch the power of suggestion to the point of ludicrous insanity, given that whatever changes in temperament Esther has allegedly undergone, it's not like kids physically change that much just because they're four years older.
The idea that the Albrights were so traumatized by Esther's disappearance that they're willing to accept this girl with the frozen stare as their own violates logic.
But don't be alarmed. There is an explanation in the film. If you like Julia Stiles and were wondering what she was doing in a potboiler like this one, there's an answer: Tricia, rather than being the typical parent/victim/stooge in an attack-of-the-kid-from-hell horror movie, has a devious agenda. She is aware of what is going on. Stiles plays her with a frozen frown, an iron will, and a grand scheme that would explain everything if it weren't so ridiculous. (It has to do with resurrecting Allen's spirit.)
Gunnar (Matthew Finlan), the Albrights' teenage son, adds a note of cheesy entitlement worthy of a Trump scion to the film, which turns into a battle of wits between the calculating mother and the fake daughter.
However, what happens is so contrived that accepting it requires even more audience contortions than Esther's original ruse. "Orphan: First Kill" is plodding and devoid of suspense. Fuhrman invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script confines her to playing Esther as a one-note terror mascot, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun. If there is a sequel, I hope they figure out how to make Esther the pretend monster girl into a multi-layered character.
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