film review: Orphan: First Kill (2022)

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

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

***Some very mild spoilers***

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.

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