Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Orphan: First Kill’ on Prime Video, in Which Isabelle Fuhrman Improbably Reprises Her Role as a Murderous Little Girl for an Insane Prequel

Now on Paramount+, Orphan: First Kill may be the nuttiest horror sequel since Jason Voorhees went to outer space. It’s technically a prequel to 2009’s goofy-ass slasher Orphan, starring Isabelle Fuhrman as a murderous little girl who actually wasn’t a little girl, but a 33-year-old woman who passed as a little girl thanks to a rare medical disorder that stunted her growth. It apparently became enough of a cult hit over the past dozen-plus years to justify bringing Fuhrman back to reprise her role, despite the actress currently being 25 years old. So how does a grown woman play a kid-sized person who’s actually a grown woman? Camera tricks, makeup and body doubles, with reportedly no CGI – and a healthy dose of camp surely helps grease the suspension-of-disbelief machine.

ORPHAN: FIRST KILL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: ESTONIA, 2007. A kind and friendly woman (Gwendolyn Collins) visits a mental hospital, and the moment she says “I’m an art-therapy instructor,” she’s clearly doomed. DOOOOOMED. She’s there to see the facility’s most dangerous patient, Leena Klammer (Fuhrman), who, the script reminds us, “may look like a child, but she is a grown woman.” It soon becomes evident that Leena would rather not be in this facility, as she does all manner of extreme things to escape it, including putting a knife into peoples’ bodies over and over and over again until they die. Worse still, she seems to enjoy doing it, which is just extra not-nice.

So Leena R-U-N-N-O-F-Ts and concocts a plan to get out of the country: Pretend to be an American girl named Esther who went missing four years ago, and go live with that girl’s family, probably not happily ever after. The Albrights live in DARIEN, CONNECTICUT, in a gorgeous old brick mansion. The dad, Allen (Rossif Sutherland), is a fine artist who paints fine-art paintings with hidden layers of paint that you can only see if you turn off the regular lights and turn on blacklights – “Nothing is ever just one thing, right?” he says, and don’t you believe it, buster! The mom, Tricia (Julia Stiles), is a philanthropist, I think; one tends to get distracted by all the body doubles and forced perspective, so some of the details slip by you. And their teenage son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) is very good at the rich-people sport of fencing, but not the rich-people sport of polo, because that would be too hard on the movie’s budget, and wouldn’t contrive to leave sharp objects lying around the Albright house.

Leena’s ruse isn’t wholly convincing, but when you’ve been in the throes of grief for four years like Allen has, I can see how you want to believe this weird-looking person – creepy pigtails, creepy choker, creepy schoolmarm dresses, creepy giant black empty pupils – is actually your child. Tricia seems to be giving “Esther” the benefit of the doubt. Gunnar has a look on his face like he smells some fishyness around here. A police detective (Hiro Kanagawa) stops by and has a similar air of disbelief around him. He must know something, therefore he must die. But her ruse can’t stand forever, can it? What’s she gonna do, just kill whoever figures her out? Why is she not disappearing into the night? Does she just want to murder the Albrights first, for no reason but to satiate whatever bloodthirsty demon lurks inside her psyche? Do we ever really see her “first kill”? So many questions.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Bugs Bunny short with Babyface Finster in it.

Performance Worth Watching: Stiles works through this dreck with a straight face like a true pro.

Memorable Dialogue: A couple of choice decontextualized one liners:

“This is insane, even for us!” – Gunnar

“All macaws are parrots, but not all f—ing parrots are macaws!” – Tricia

Sex and Skin: Nothing noteworthy.

Our Take: First Kill takes 30 minutes to get revved up, half the movie before it really starts toying with us, and I didn’t laugh until the final act. Mind you, the movie wants to be laughed at – its mega-cheapo wobble-cam digital-video aesthetic and double-ultra-whopper-with-cheese plot twist are too ludicrously self-conscious to be anything but blatant ploys for our pseudo-derisive snickering. The whole shebang, from the old-mind/young-body premise to its dogged execution via practical effects, will test your tolerance for patent ridiculousness. Fuhrman’s vaguely unconvincing attempt to pass as a little girl is both part of the joke (hey, look how insane our movie is!) and part of the horror (the Albrights must be thinking those four years were really, really hard on their poor girl), but she doesn’t tap into the character’s deep derangement or imply a motive for her actions. Esther is just a Movie Character without much charisma.

It’d be easy to admire the movie for its audacity if it didn’t feel so rote in its histrionic crappiness down the stretch. Credit the screenplay for staying a step ahead of us and not being too predictable; ding the director (William Brent Bell, The Boy) for not delivering a single memorable kill. I can’t help but think back at what a wild ride James Wan’s Malignant was, with its mad, mad, mad, mad, mad twist and hot, steaming wads of style – like First Kill, that movie is proud to be several bananas shy of a bunch, but it differs because it actually sticks with you like Bubble Yum in your bouffant. This Orphan prequel has its moments (a clever invocation of the theme to Flashdance, for example), but beyond its laudably foolhardy technique, it’s the usual forgettable horror junk.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Unless you’re one of those maniacs who has to see every horror movie no matter how crappy it is – and you know who you are – Orphan: First Kill just doesn’t deliver the goods often enough to warrant your time.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.