The Bad Adoptee

Set two years before the events of its predecessor, Orphan: First Kill (this one directed by William Brent Bell) details Leena’s bloody escape from an Estonian sanitarium and her time with the WASPy Albrights of Darien, Connecticut—the family doomed to meet a fiery fate before she lands with the Colemans. Leena has chosen the Albrights with the plans of impersonating their missing daughter, Esther, which she manages to do, albeit imperfectly: Allen (Rossif Sutherland), an artist, blindly bonds with her, despite her strange accent and her inconsistent account of her absence, but his socialite wife, Tricia (Julia Stiles) and their son, Gunnar (Matthew Finlan), plainly distrust her, even as they disguise their suspicions before Allen. Detective Donnan (Hiro Kanagawa), too, long haunted by the case, regards Esther with thinly veiled incredulity. This time, the dramatic twist arrives halfway through the film, when Esther, in the middle of attacking Donnan, finds an unexpected ally in Tricia, who shoots him dead. Online chatter feverishly embraced Stiles’s weary delivery of the lines: “So let me get this straight: you’re a grown-ass woman, and a wanted criminal? That is beyond fucked-up.” More than 10 years after the release of the first film, the prequel entered a new cinematic landscape and shrewdly—if, on occasion, speciously—leaned into camp and dark humor. But really, the most telling dialogue comes straight after, when Tricia waves her arm over Doonan’s lifeless body, lying before them in a pool of his own blood. “This is all I ever do anymore, by the way. Clean up after my kids,” she sighs. “Mommy takes care of everything.” She admits she had known all along that Leena was an imposter because Esther isn’t really missing: Gunnar killed his sister four years ago, and Tricia covered it up. Kate and Tricia, then, represent two deceptively opposing versions of motherhood: one vulnerable, one steely; one driven mad by the structural forces that ensure women remain unheard amid her to parent effectively while mired in trauma, and the other versed in deception and cynical, calculated silence, thus able to survive through disguise, not unlike Leena herself. In fact, both women may be defined by their—somewhat flawed—devotion to their children, however (in Tricia’s case) misguided.

Horror returns so frequently (if not fundamentally) to the family as a unifying image in part because it operates as a reliable provenance for all manner of dysfunction. Esther infiltrates not-quite-happy homes, already devastatingly fractured before she ever appeared, and—before filial rejection incites her bloody rampages—simply exposes the rusted schisms. If Esther emerges as a villain for the Colemans, she is clearly the protagonist in the film’s nominal prequel. Both films to date revel in the core depravity and misery bred within the nuclear family: stifling gender roles, jealous children, jealous parents, and the threat of incest. Superficially, the series’ duality seems to disparage adoption (a critique levied against the first movie), but upon closer inspection, both films more vigorously object to the patriarchal, bourgeois-capitalist families at their center: the Albrights certainly, but also the oft-distracted Colemans, who persistently fail to keep close enough tabs on their children. This affords Esther much latitude to terrorize them. While Kate is turned away, her car—with Max in the back seat—begins a steady roll down a hill. Daniel’s treehouse is nearly embers before Kate realizes it’s ablaze (although she stands in full view of the window), and by then, her son is horribly injured. But even before Esther came to menace her, Kate carries the unbearable guilt sired from her neglect, when Max almost drowned in an icy lake outside their home when Kate was deep in the throes of her alcoholism.

Motherhood becomes the cornerstone of this franchise-in-the-making, but each matriarch is activated by Esther, the archetypal Daughter—the Mother’s inevitable usurper—and therefore, like any double, a harbinger of death. The films are inspired by the case of then-34-year-old Barbora Skrlová, who disguised herself as a 13-year-old girl and convinced her first adoptive mother to abuse her children, then later impersonated a 13-year-old boy who had gone missing. The Orphan films largely borrow from a sprawling screen heritage of spectral, mad, or demonic children, most visibly The Bad Seed (1956) and The Brood (1979). But Esther’s desires are hardly immature; she does not long for a mother’s love nor is she driven by childish greed that spills over into murder. Her truest ancestor is the girl-vampire Claudia, who, likewise, in Interview with the Vampire (1994), grew older and wiser while her body remained eternally a child’s (as played by a preteen Kirsten Dunst). Esther longs for sexual satisfaction, but she seems to specifically want a husband and father, and invariably ends up driven to violence when these men, who have previously seen her as their daughter, spurn her advances. If Claudia gave literal expression to the social condition of 18th-century womanhood—forever infantilized and enshrined in the domestic—Esther appears even more tragic: destined to remain locked, not just in childhood, but in her own alienation. 🩸