Orphan: First Kill (2022)

Directed by William Brent Bell. Starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Julia Stiles, Rossif Sutherland, Matthew Finlan, Hiro Kanagawa, Gwendolyn Collins, Samantha Walkes. [R]

Gratuitous prequel goes back to Leena/Esther’s time in a European psychiatric institute before breaking out and posing as the longtime missing child of American parents Stiles and Sutherland, but how long before the truth comes out and/or Esther starts killing again? With the cat out of the bag about who “Esther” really is, the first film’s sense of twisted discovery is relegated to a macabre mid-film twist that promises more than it pays off. All that’s left, then, is to see how it all plays out, even though the ending is never in any doubt. If credibility was taxed in the original, it’s completely shattered here, and not just because twenty-three-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman can no longer convincingly pull off playing a little girl. Director William Brent Bell doesn’t savor the ghoulishness and absurdity of these situations with the same sort of darkly comic gusto as Orphan’sJaume Collet-Serra, even though the material begs for either Grand Guignol or full-blown parody treatment (more dead rats in health shakes, please!). The subtitle is also misleading since I’m sure Esther committed murder prior to her institutionalization, and even if she hadn’t, she dispatches a skeevy sucker within the first ten or fifteen minutes, getting that “first kill” out of the way before the main story even kicks in (like saying Halloween: Resurrection stars Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead role). Fuhrman also received an associate producer credit.

45/100