Orphan: First Kill

A surprisingly decent prequel, Orphan: First Kill follows Isabelle Fuhrman’s Esther as she makes a violent escape from an Estonian psychiatric facility and tricks Julia Stiles’ Tricia and Rossif Sutherland’s Allen into believing that she’s their missing young daughter. It’s a familiar premise that is, at the outset, employed to far-from-promising effect by William Brent Bell, as the filmmaker, armed with David Coggeshall’s screenplay, offers up a somewhat generic opening stretch that’s compounded by oddly (and distractingly) low-rent, styleless visuals (ie the movie resembles one of those early shot-on-digital features, for the most part) – with the tolerable atmosphere, in the narrative’s early stages, due almost entirely to Fuhrman’s mesmerizing turn as the malevolent title character. (It’s clear, too, that the impressive special effects ensure that the actress is able to convincingly become her childlike-on-the-outside figure.) There’s little doubt, then, that Orphan: First Kill benefits from a mid-movie twist that paves the way for an unexpectedly engaging and entertaining second half, as the picture transforms into a briskly-paced thriller that boasts an assortment of stirring, violent set-pieces and genuinely unpredictable plot developments – which, when coupled with a satisfying climactic stretch, ultimately does cement the movie’s place as a better-than-average horror follow-up that fares better than one might’ve initially anticipated.

*** out of ****