phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2022

Orphan : First Kill



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2022
Runtime: 1h 39m
Country: USA, Canada
Language: English, Estonian
Genre Tags: Crime, Drama, Horror
Plot Summary: After orchestrating a brilliant escape from an Estonian psychiatric facility, Esther travels to America by impersonating the missing daughter of a wealthy family.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: A prequel to a movie where a child played a woman pretending to be a child. The same child is now an actual grown woman playing a woman pretending to be a child even younger than when she actually was a child herself. Got it? Accept this inherent silliness of this and the movie is campy fun. Isabelle Fuhrman and Julia Stiles definitely understood the assignment, and any scene with them is great. I was worried this was going to try and be the same as the first movie, but fortunately it zigged when I thought it would zag, and I wound up having a surprisingly good time.


Outside Reviews:

Brian Tallerico
2 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Fuhrman and Stiles understood the assignment. Fuhrman, so good in last year's "The Novice" too, knows how to play coiled tension and she holds together a lot of the film through her sheer will. And then there's Stiles, who goes from grieving mother to something with sharper edges as the actress sells some of the film's more out-there turns. There are opportunities wasted here to dig into family roles and class commentary, but that's often overcome by how much fun Furhman and Stiles seem to be having in the film's second half.


Katie Rife
Grade: C+ - An imposter comes home

It's a common problem in exploitation films, a category in which "First Kill" definitely belongs. What else would you call a movie where a grown woman playing another grown woman who looks like a little girl angrily jabs at a piano with bloody fingers, binds her breasts with an Ace bandage and drives around in a stolen car wearing sunglasses and red lipstick, smoking a cigarette while "Maniac" blares on the stereo? But, again, describing scattered moments in a movie like "Orphan: First Kill" is more fun than watching the film as a whole. That's how they get you.