YMMV / Orphan: First Kill

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • When Leena pushes Allen to his death for rejecting her, she calls out his name and looks heartbroken for a bit, which makes it unclear if she really intended to kill him then and there or might've just pushed him away by accident due to her emotions.
  • Did Gunnar kill the real Esther intentionally and hailed it as an accomplishment on his part? Or did he do it by accident and simply bragged about it to (fruitlessly) scare Leena believing he had leverage over her? The film is pretty cryptic about this part. Tricia said it was an accident however she may have also been trying to rationalize that to lessen the blow. Her son potentially going to prison, and he murdered his sister. And given how dedicated Tricia was to keeping her family together one can assume this was a bout of denial. The film also implies that Allen had a slight favoritism of Esther which more than likely upset Gunnar which likely contributed to his more violent tendencies. That all said he did seem scared when he shoved Leena down the stairs (implied to be how the real Esther died) implying that it may have all been an accident after all.
• Contested Sequel: It's either a fun and sleazy thriller or a stupid attempt at an origin story. A good indicator is how the movie has better review number on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, with the audience rating on the former also being higher... but the IMDB score is a downgrade, from 7.0 to 5.9.
• Fridge Brilliance: From a Watsonian perspective, having Leena/Esther look older in the prequel compared to the original film can be attributed to living in a mental institution for so long that she's become malnourished during her time there (and works with Leena's ruse that she's the missing Esther Albright who was abducted four years ago only to turn up in Russia, having much sharper facial features hinting that she was "starved and tortured"). Between two films, she stayed in an Orphanage of Love where she's most likely fed and housed properly, and as a result, looks healthier and "fuller" by the time of the first film's events, and is able to pass for a child much more convincingly. This also extends to her con looking like a Paper-Thin Disguise at first, so during her stay in the orphanage, she's able to observe other children in her surroundings, polishing her childish façade.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: A very interesting case of this that keeps the Villain Protagonist more tolerable than the others around her. It's revealed that the girl Esther/Leena is impersonating was killed by her brother, whose mother then helped cover it up. However, Tricia and Gunnar Albright are easier to hate because of their racism against her for being Eastern European, classism, ableism in mocking her dwarfism, and self-centered natures.
• Older than You Think: The plot of a grifter infiltrating a wealthy family by posing as a long lost child, only to discover that the person they're impersonating has been Dead All Along and some of the family members are in on the conspiracy, originated with the classic mystery novel Brat Farrar, which in turn was loosely adapted into the 1963 Hammer Horror film Paranoiac.
  • This premise has also been used as a storyline in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on two separate occasions, inspired by the Frédéric Bourdin case.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Reviews were more positive than with Orphan, with particular praise for not rehashing the original while taking on unexpected lurid directions.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: When the first trailer came out, many people noted that, while the (mostly practical) efforts to de-age Isabelle Fuhrman weren't perfect, they were still pretty impressive.
• The Woobie: Allen Albright. Out of the entire family, he's the one most affected by his daughter's disappearance and when it seems like she finally returns, he doesn't even ask any questions about why she's so different now. He's just happy that she's back and he has someone to share his hobbies with. Inevitably, things take a turn for the worse when he sees his own wife and "daughter" hanging for their lives in the roof of their house, which is being engulfed by flames, and he's forced to choose between saving Tricia or Esther where he ends up choosing the latter. Then when he finds out that the "little girl" he's been comforting in his arms is not his little girl after all, he's killed for it. He spends the last few seconds of his life processing what he'd just seen, and never finds out the real situation with Esther's "disappearance".

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