Orphan: First Kill (2022)
Written by David Coggeshall (screenplay by), David Leslie Johnson McGoldrick (story by), Alex Mace (story by)
Directed by William Brent Bell​

After orchestrating a brilliant escape from an Estonian psychiatric facility, Esther travels to America by impersonating the missing daughter of a wealthy family. (IMDB)

Review by: Mark Walker

Creepy Esther is back! Well, technically she isn’t ‘back’ as this is a prequel to the 2009 twisted horror, Orphan, starring Isabelle Fuhrman as the titular, parent-less psycho. And, thinking about it, this isn’t her first kill either, but hey, who needs to argue semantics when there is a killer on the loose!?

Orphan: First Kill takes us back before the first film and, although not quite an origin story, it explores the events that led up to Esther ending up in an orphanage and adopted by the Colemans.

First Kill opens with Leena (not yet Esther) in the Saarne Institute where she is introduced as the 30-year-old, dangerous killer that we all know her to be. The cat was definitely let out of the bag in the first film so there is no need for First Kill to play coy when it comes to who Leena/Esther really is.

Anyway, after using her “skills” to manipulate a guard with slightly less than savoury intentions, Leena escapes the institute and weasels her way into Tricia (Julia Styles) and Allen Albright’s (Rossif Sutherland) home, pretending to be their daughter, Esther, who has been missing for 4 years. The cat is back in the bag now, and we are on familiar ground with Leena pretending to be Esther and setting her sights on Allen as the ‘daddy’ of the family, in much the same way that she did in Orphan.

Esther/Leena clearly just wants to be loved…

In the original Orphan, Esther also found herself with two new younger siblings that she could manipulate. In First Kill, she finds she has an ‘older’ brother in the form of Gunner (Matthew Finlan) and he is definitely not overjoyed at his sister’s return. Tricia also appears suspicious of Esther and is not convinced by her therapist visits. She also shows some concern over Esther’s growing attachment to Allen.

So, all kinds of familiar up to this point.

And that was always going to be the problem for a prequel to a film that had a pretty killer twist. Whether you saw it coming or not, it was pretty demented and certainly left a bad taste in the audience’s mouth. However, with First Kill, we all know the secret and I was concerned that the First Kill crew wouldn’t be able to pull off anything to match Orphan.

While I don’t think they quite manage it, First Kill does take some unexpected turns which are fairly self-aware and counter the absurdity of the whole Leena/Esther deception. While there needed to be a slightly higher than normal suspension of disbelief it does, ultimately, work so we are not left with an identikit re-tread of the first film. And things unravel pretty quickly in the final act until we end up with Esther looking like she has got away with everything and is on her way to the orphanage.

The fact that I don’t really see that last sentence as a spoiler, highlights the other main problem for First Kill; there is little suspense when it comes to Esther. We know she is going to show up again in Orphan, so we know she isn’t going to die, and we know, from Orphan, that the family she was with all perished so, again, there is a lack of tension.

However, the film does a good job of making the journey entertaining and bloody. Esther is a monster, and we get to see her at her best (?) as she fights for survival.

I was slightly confused with the name of the family in First Kill being different from the name mentioned in Orphan when the Coleman’s were being told about Esther’s previous family, even though the outcome was similar for both. Whether this was just a cock-up or opens the potential for Esther’s return to destroy another family, I guess we will need to wait and see.

There aren’t many sympathetic characters in First Kill. Most of the characters you might have sympathy for are killed off early on in the film, so you don’t get too attached and they don’t get much chance to develop. But the main family unit surrounding Esther is complex and mildly crazy itself, so they are entertaining, even if you don’t care about them.

In a weird way, and I suspect the director is just messing with your head, you may end up rooting for Esther.

The cast here are all great and Isabelle Furhman is suitably creepy again as Esther, although I guess it must be getting a little harder for her to play 10. I wonder if the next Orphan film will be a true origin story and we will go back a bit further to see Leena in her 20s developing her love of mayhem and murder, and realising the potential in her condition?
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Who knows? But I’d be up for a third. I don’t think First Kill is quite as good as Orphan, but then it was always going to struggle when its main twist has already been revealed and we know that Esther is in no real danger. However, First Kill does a decent job of taking us somewhere new with Esther and, by introducing its own twist, has a good stab at doing something different.

Glorious opens with Wes (Ryan Kwanten) pulling into a roadside rest stop with a car full of belongings and a bagful of regret. It appears that he is running from a difficult split from his girlfriend, Brenda. A run-in with a dodgy vending machine and then a bottle of bourbon and a fire pit leave him lying in the dirt, trouser-less and feeling pretty sorry for himself.

Waking the following morning with the need to vomit and purge himself of the bourbon, Wes bursts into the rest room for a ‘glorious’ evacuation as a mysterious stranger (J. K. Simmons) in the next stall begins a conversation with him through a glory (see what they did there?) hole.

I’m not sure I would have stuck around at this point, but what starts out as a bit weird takes a more sinister and then dramatic turn as Wes’ Glorious Purpose is revealed, and he discovers that the fate of the Universe may well hang upon his downtrodden shoulders. Will Wes come through for the Universe?

Well, you are going to have to watch Glorious to find out.

Glorious has a run time of 80 minutes and this was the perfect length for the film. When you have a movie that is largely a two-hander (with only half the ensemble onscreen) confined to a tiny rest stop bathroom, you need to be frugal and make the best of the time. It is always a danger with contained thrillers/horrors like this that the setting will restrict the effectiveness of the film; two people talking at each other for 80 minutes in one room always runs the risk of being dull. This is not the case with Glorious, and McKendry has directed a really tight little movie that doesn’t once drag. The location is used well and the conversation between Wes and whatever the hell it is in stall two never, well… stalls.

It is a lot to ask of an actor, but Kwanten does a great job as Wes, carrying the weight of the world (and the film) on his shoulders. Simmons is offscreen throughout the film, with just his glorious voice floating out from the toilet stall; I think I could listen to him read the phone book and still enjoy it.

There are a couple of satellite characters who pop up; Tordy Clark as Sharon, a mysterious woman who helps Wes with the vending machine at the start of the film, Sylvia Grace Crim who plays Brenda in a series of flashbacks and André Lamar as Gary, the rest stop manager. Seeing how things end for Gary, Sharon did the right thing by leaving in the first few minutes of the film!

There is plenty of gore in Glorious for those who want it, in between the philosophising and angst from Wes, and the special effects are nicely done. I particularly liked a sequence where Simmons’ character Ghat, explains his story through animated hallucinations on the toilet walls.

And there is humour in Glorious as well as horror. It’s not a comedy as such, but there are a couple of funny moments that break up the tension a little and did make me chuckle to myself; you can’t have a set up like this and not do a gag involving the glory hole!
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Glorious is a well-written and directed film that is lean, fun, and gory. It has half a foot in some serious moral themes but doesn’t get bogged down trying to be too clever. It knows what it is, plays to those strengths and is a glorious example of what you can do with a contained horror

Review​

I like a movie to leave me off my guard. I don’t want to know what happens; I don’t even want an inkling. Movies that have me shitting my pants in surprise, you know? Bring Him Back Dead was a little bit predictable. I suppose it’s going to be seeing as it follows an overpopulated plot line. Reservoir Dogs spring to mind. They both examine the greed and desperation of the main characters. 

People under pressure do idiotic things. The desolated cabin in the woods is the backdrop for the internal fighting, no one can hear you scream whilst you bleed out and it’s easy to escape with the goods when it all goes tits up. 

A movie that does what it says on the tin. High adrenaline, high octane thrill ride. You can’t trust anyone when black shadows are creeping at every junction. A brilliant examination of the human condition and it’s hunger for money and violence. 

Hi there, I’m Yvonne.Book Reviewer/ General all-round Nerd
Well, what can i say about me? I’m a 32 year old married woman and mum to 3 crazy boys, aged 12,5 and 3. My eldest has a genetic condition that causes a visual impairment so as you can imagine life can be very chaotic and provides many challenges along the way but I would 100% never change any of them. They fulfil my life beyond measure.
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I Adore Books – I adore shouting about books! I’m a reviewer of all genres, whether that be Epic Fantasy, Gothic Horror, a historical romance or a race-to-the-end thriller. I will read them all.

I had a bit of a tough time with Josiah and what he saw. On the one hand we have some impressive performances from the main cast; Robert Patrick chews the scenery as the over-bearing, drunken father, Scott Haze as the youngest, troubled son and Nick Stahl and Kelli Garner as his equally troubled older twin siblings. Matched with the slow burn direction and the oppressive, southern gothic atmosphere, Josiah builds up the tension between the family carefully and deliberately over the 2-hour running time.

On the other hand, I got a little distracted.

Josiah is built like an anthology and divided into three parts. We start with an introduction to Josiah himself (Patrick) and his younger son Thomas (Haze). They live on an old, run-down family farm, away from town and away from other people; Thomas, legally obliged to do so through a restraining order from his ex-wife. Josiah and Thomas have a difficult relationship, strained further when Josiah begins to see visions of his dead wife who took her own life when the kids were younger.

Meanwhile, an oil company is buying up land around the town and their farm is one of the last plots they are trying to get their hands on. Writing to Thomas and his siblings, Eli and Mary (Stahl and Garner) with an offer they can’t refuse, the firm unwittingly draws the family together opening old wounds and revealing secrets from a past life everyone is trying to escape.

I liked this set-up, it draws you into the world of Josiah and Thomas, where things are not quite right. However, the film then takes a big turn when it introduces us to his brother Eli and then sister Mary in two chapters that leave Thomas and Josiah completely behind for a good hour of the film. While I understand the reasoning behind this, setting up both siblings, their lives and backstory, the film moved away from the heart of the story for too long and my attention wandered.

Much of what we learn in that central hour of the film could have been condensed and delivered faster; the whole film (in my opinion) could have easily coped with having thirty minutes cut from its runtime. The film focusses on sins of the past, the trauma and events of the three kids’ childhood and they would have had more time to confront those demons and explore their fears, the sooner they were all thrown together on the farm: the childhood home where all that trauma was created.

And, as soon as they were all back together, just 30 minutes before the end of the film, it drew me back in. Revelations come flooding out and the realisation of what happened in the past and the relationships between the family are both unsettling and horrific. They are not entirely clear either, the narrators not being the most reliable of people; do we really get the whole truth and nothing but it? There are multiple interpretations of what Josiah saw and none of them are particularly pleasant, but the film works best when focussing on them.