‘Orphan: First Kill’ Review: The Return of Isabelle Fuhrman as Esther, the Pretend Child Psycho, in an Even More Preposterous Prequel
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticEsther (Isabelle Fuhrman), the demon child of the 2009 horror thriller “Orphan,” was a 9-year-old psycho freak who dressed like a frumpy Victorian doll and spoke in a Russian accent, which upped the ante on her malevolence by making her seem not just a junior devil but a junior devil from the land of Putin.
Movies about monster children go way back (the original one, “The Bad Seed,” was released in 1956), and after “The Omen” and “The Brood” and “Ringu” and so many others, there wasn’t a lot of room left for a pulp horror film like “Orphan” to surprise us.
But the movie, in its schlocky blunderbuss way, did have an original twist: Esther was not, in fact, 9 years old — she was a woman in her early 30s named Leena who had a rare hormonal disorder that stunted her physical development.
The folly of “Orphan” is that it wasn’t much different from the film it would have been had Esther simply been 9 years old. If you’re going to make the adult-woman-in-a-child’s-body horror concept stick, it needs to be executed with psychology, imagination, and flair, three things that “Orphan” did not have.
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