Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2009 horror hit Orphan hinged on an 11th-hour twist that can justifiably be called ridiculous: [spoiler alert] the eponymous child (Isabelle Fuhrman) that wreaked havoc on Vera Farmiga and her family turned out to be an adult woman who suffered from a rare disorder that stunted her growth, and a violent escapee from a psychiatric institution. The wild plot turn didn’t make Fuhrman, who was all of 10 years old at the time, any less convincing as a bad bad seed. Can the actress, now 25, pull off the same powerful performance as an adult? If Orphan: First Kill isn’t nearly as successful as its predecessor, it’s not her fault. But with the mystery revealed, director William Brent Bell’s competent thriller misses most of what made the original so good.
First Kill begins in 2007 at Estonia’s Saarne Institute, a high-security mental facility whose most dangerous patient is 30-year-old Leena (Fuhrman). And naturally, as we learned in the previous film, she breaks free. But now what? Poring through missing-child cases, Leena finds that she bears some resemblance to Esther, whose wealthy parents Tricia (Julia Stiles) and Allen (Rossif Sutherland), as well as their teenage son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan), have been devastated since their unresolved loss four years ago.
Somehow, it doesn’t take long for Leena to convince the family that she’s their lost daughter, and that plays into this movie’s twist. But where Collet-Serra turned this fantastical device into something that tapped the horrors of parental anxiety and corrupted youth, Bell’s approach is not unsettling so much as campy. That might be an apt tone for this material, but it cheapens it. The contrast between the villain’s diminutive frame and the Hannibal Lecter-level precautions taken around her is kind of funny, but there’s one needle-drop that’s far too on-the-nose ― though without revealing what ‘80s soundtrack hit is deployed at an opportunistic moment, it does come from a film that likewise tells a story of lost innocence.
But the 2009 film resonated so much more deeply, and not just because it played up maternal fears of failed pregnancies and endangered children. Although Collet-Serra didn’t direct any of the Taken movies, the director was crucial to Liam Neeson’s shift to middle-aged action hero, which pivots on an aging man’s concern that he’s no longer physically able to keep his loved ones safe. That feeling of inadequacy is part of what drives the mother in Orphan, and Farmiga’s deeply felt performance as a recovering alcoholic mother helped transform a lurid horror movie into a highly personal drama.
First Kill, on the other hand, while it plays on what are perhaps timely issues of class, doesn’t have the depth of the original. Stiles has fun with a role that’s more than it appears, but it’s still less than a two-dimensional part. For that matter, none of these characters are more than genre chess pieces that the director moves to play out his cheeky gambit, and David Coggeshall’s First Kill script misses the fuller lives suggested by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick’s richer 2009 script. And much of the current film falls to that distinct 21st-century curse of having to explain things. Remember that backstory you heard about in 2009? Well here it is visualized for your amusement! This is how Esther developed her black-light painting technique! And so on.
Some of us prefer to have their mystery, even if you already know that the monster child that almost killed an entire family in 2009 is an adult. The journey from adult to child isn’t as poignant as that from child to adult; it’s the difference between a child whose circumstances force it to confront adulthood early, and a mere case of arrested development. Which is the scarier prospect?
Photo courtesy of Paramount Players
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