Her age at the time, and her ability to play Esther's inherent darkness, helped facilitate the now-famous twist that Esther is not a little girl, but a woman in her 30s with a genetic disorder that makes her look like a child. While Kate (Vera Farmiga), the mother in the first film, was fine killing "Esther" to protect her kids, Tricia is willing to do it to protect her secrets and her kid.How do you make a prequel about a character who looks like a 10-year-old girl when more than a decade has passed since the original film, and the actor playing that character is now a 25-year-old woman? That's the central challenge that came with Orphan: First Kill, the follow-up to 2009's Orphan, in which Isabelle Fuhrman returns to show us the origins of the terrifying Esther Albright.įuhrman was only 10 years old when she first played Esther, an orphan who's adopted by a loving family reeling from a terrible loss in Jaume Collet-Serra's original film. Leena finally met someone willing to do all the same things as she was. If the writers had done anything else, the movie wouldn't have been as entertaining as it was. Adding in that the family she was trying to infiltrate was responsible for their daughter's death, meaning they knew from the moment Leena appeared she couldn't be who she said she was, created an excellent game of cat and mouse (or rat) that, though slow at times, kept the audience on their toes. We didn't know how she did it, but we knew it happened. We already knew that she had escaped a facility in Europe. We already knew she had a family that had previously died in a house fire. In doing a prequel, especially when the audience is already in on the secret, the struggle then becomes how to keep the premise interesting and engaging without dropping in information just for the sake of introducing something new. But, it gave the film the life it needed. Was it as surprising as it could've been? No. Was it one of the few paths the plot could take? Yes. That makes it less of a twist and more of a necessary plot beat tied into a "twist" that is more about the real Esther and not about Leena. Orphan set the precedent that someone always figures out who Leena really is, and it would've felt fake if no one ever found out in First Kill. When you really think about it, this was the only way for the film to go. Related: Orphan: First Kill Review: The Prequel Needed to Happen Sooner It wouldn't make sense for the detective to tell everyone who she was at that point in the film, so they needed another way to explain someone knowing who Leena was now that the information was out there. Once Detective Donnan figured out the DNA profiles didn't match, it was only a matter of time before Leena's heist was up. There was always something off with how Tricia and Gunnar reacted to the news that Esther had been found, something that couldn't just be written off as an angsty teenage boy or shell-shocked mother. While it felt like a surprise at the moment, looking back, it didn't quite feel like a twist in the same way that Leena's true identity was revealed in the original film. That said, because there were only a handful of ways the plot could go after the reveal, the twist did make the movie feel a touch predictable. While it made up for it with the ending, if the decision hadn't been made by Gunnar and Tricia to kill Leena, the twist would've ruined the film and given it no direction. While the reveal worked with the events that followed, it did feel like the film dragged for a bit because the surprise twist came at the halfway point instead of during the final act. This does not go according to plan, and everyone but Leena dies as the house goes up in flames. The final act comes when the two Albrights decide to kill Leena, staging it as a self-inflicted death. In an act of retaliation, Leena gives Tricia a smoothy containing the dead rat. Leena tries to push them into the path of an oncoming train after Tricia attempts to poison her with dinner, which Leena knew about because she fed the food to a rat that lived in a vent in her room. The three grow suspicious of each other, which becomes the entire premise of the second half of the film.
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