In short: Orphan: First Kill (2022)

Warning: spoilers to come!

This somewhat unexpected – and a lot cheaper looking – prequel to 2009’s Orphan tells of the earlier adventures of child-impersonating little person serial killer Leena (Isabelle Fuhrman, reprising her role). After escaping from an Estonian asylum and a couple of murders, our protagonist manages to convince the authorities of being a lost American heiress.

Impersonating Esther, the daughter of the stinking rich Albrights – painter Dad Allen (Rossif Sutherland), mother Tricia (Julia Stiles) and rich jock son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) – comes naturally to our murderous heroine, but Leena’s customary love for Daddy only as well as some rather off-beat revelations regarding the family make her life rather more interesting than she probably expected.

For the first forty, forty-five minutes or so, Orphan: First Kill is a pretty terrible movie. It looks more like a cheap TV movie than an actual film (shot for streaming or not), director William Brent Bell bravely striding away from the technical merits of the Jaume Collet-Serra original into the lands of random indoor fog, shoddy lighting and an editing rhythm so generic and lifeless, it’s some kind of achievement. Parts of the visual and direction problems do of course come from the stunt idea of again casting the now fully grown Isabelle Fuhrman as Leena, a young woman who is most certainly neither a Little Person nor a child, so all kinds of cheap and obvious looking camera tricks have to be taken to at least make her look small; she also does a lot of acting on her knees. All of which doesn’t exactly lend itself to improve the visual style. Nor does it ever distract from the little problem that nobody would believe Fuhrman to be nine years old even if she were small, which turns much of the film ridiculous.

That the script does neither hold up to even the tiniest bit of logical scrutiny nor manages to deliver enough cool and interesting murder set pieces to distract from it does of course not improve things at this point, either.

Until, at about the half-way mark, First Kill turns into the most fucked-up and bizarre Lifetime movie imaginable, a movie where everyone but painter dad is a murderous psychopath and expresses this in the most delightfully overblown way possible, until Leena starts to look like the sane one. Bell’s direction and the whole Furhman not being a child anymore business still get in the way a little, but Fuhrman, Stiles and Finlan deliver a lot of vigorous scenery chewing. Even the script suddenly seems to realize that being (more than) a bit dumb is something that doesn’t have to get in the way of being entertaining in a trashy, twisty, over the top manner and begins delivering preposterous but fun nonsense by the minute.