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.

Three Films Make A Post: An Avalanche of Thrills!

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019): This is not really a film made with my age bracket in mind at all, but as a family movie that drags a well-worn pop culture character into contemporary times and social mores without going the route of deconstruction, grimdarkness or irony, Katt Shea’s film does fall into my areas of interest. The film is not just highly effective at this but charming as hell, the sort of family film even the childless like me would totally watch with their imaginary demon children and can enjoy without. It’s also excellently paced, silly when it needs to be silly, earnest when it needs to be that, clever and even mildly subversive in an unassuming way that’s easy to miss if you blink too often. Sophia Lillis makes a fantastic contemporary version of Nancy Drew too, projecting just the right mixture of self-assurance, rebellious streak, intelligence, humour and family love a modernized version of the character needs.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999): While it is not quite on its level, Nancy Drew would probably make a great double feature with what may very well be the best teen comedy/teen romance of the second half of the 90s, as directed by Gil Junger and written by the sometimes unassumingly brilliant writing team of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith. As everybody probably knows, this gives Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” a bit of an update for the late 90s teen set, making nearly all the right decisions about what to keep and what to discard of old Bill for its time and audience, adding some Old Hollywood flow to the dialogue (which always endears a romantic comedy to me), and then proceeds to charm the pants off of anyone watching with a heart and a brain.

The thing this and Nancy Drew share is an unwillingness to pretend a teen audience is dumb, so while it does a very crowd pleasing kind of dance, it also contains subtleties and complexities and isn’t afraid to show and use them, very much in the spirit of Shakespeare, the godfather of great commercial art if ever there was one. That Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger work fantastically together hardly needs mentioning.

Vibes (1988): But why not end this entry on a let-down, namely Ken Kwapis’s sad attempt at doing a romance/adventure movie clearly meant to be in the spirit of Romancing the Stone but with added psychic powers. Jeff Goldblum, Cyndi Lauper (who would have been ordered to drop the accent by any half-competent filmmaker) and Peter Falk do their best with what they are given, but there’s only so much anyone can do with a comedy script whose jokes aren’t funny, nor a romance that doesn’t know how to be romantic.


Particularly when the not terribly funny nor romantic script is then adapted with all the style and panache of a kitchen table (that’s the least stylish and panach-y thing coming to my mind right now, and it’s still funnier than most of the jokes in here), bogged down by leaden pacing and finally killed by a disturbing lack of imagination.

Three Films Make A Post: Past Passion. Past Terror. Past Murder.

A Little Trip to Heaven (2005): At first, Baltasar Kormákur’s deeply Icelandic (for a film set in the US, at least) movie seems to be a bit of a Fargo-alike, but the longer it runs, the more it becomes clear this has somewhat different sensibilities. It is a bit less concerned with futility than the Coen Brothers film, and even allows Forest Whitaker’s character to take a half successful redemptive action and end up in a curious sort of heaven as his reward. That’s despite the film being just as clear about the darkness in the hearts of men, particularly those who think they are much brighter than they actually are. It just seems to have a bit more compassion with its characters than the Coens sometimes show.

Apart from Whitaker (who is always great even if he flaunts as dubious an accent as he does here), the film also contains fine work by Julia Stiles and a particularly good performance by Jeremy Renner.

Out of Thin Air (2017): Staying in Iceland (though this is a British film), this documentary by Dylan Howitt about two suspected murders in the country and the people the police apparently tortured into believing to have committed them, without any physical evidence (like corpses) whatsoever coming up, seems to me an exemplary piece of true crime filmmaking that tells its tale calmly, not feeling the need to construct or spout outrage because the facts of what happened, and what the audience can suspect happened really don’t need to be made more dramatic than they actually were. It’s not as if the film pretends to have no position on the case, mind you, it is just intelligent enough to assume it doesn’t have to speechify at its audience about its thoughts.

There’s also a quiet, philosophical undercurrent to the endeavour, suggesting a construction of selfhood through human memory that’s all too fragile, leaving self and truth as things always in doubt.

Jane Eyre (2011): Give me the Brontë sisters and their sense of the Gothic and the dramatic over Jane Austen’s ever so ironic tales of the marriage market any day. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed Cary Joji Fukunaga’s version of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre quite a bit, particular as it is based on a Moira Buffini script that uses the proto-feminist elements of the novel in excellent ways, drawing Jane as a woman not quite fitting into her time because she as a matter of course takes the promises of humanist philosophy as belonging to her as a woman too. And all that with dialogue often very close to the book. I wish the film had done something about the madwoman in the attic, but honestly, I wouldn’t know how to go about that without rewriting half of the book either.

Fukunaga’s direction makes excellent use of bleak but exciting (to me, at least) landscape, period interiors that are claustrophobic or pretty depending on what’s appropriate, never trying to pop the film up too much nor letting get things too BBC stuffy.


Mia Wasikowska – whom I’ve still have to see in anything amounting to a weak performance – is expectedly wonderful, fully realizing the fragilities, the immense strength, the mix of wisdom won through pain and the naivety of the not terribly worldly Jane. Michael Fassbender is fine, too, though the film does focus quite a bit more on Jane – and rightly so.