(SPOT.ph) We thought we had seen it all in an age where a 28-year-old Andrew Garfield can portray the teenage superhero Spider-Man and where the cast of HBO’s Euphoria makes you existentially question what sort of bizarre high school you were missing out on when you were younger. However, we shall be witnessing a whole, new weird level of cinematic de-aging in cinemas soon, when the 25-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman returns to her famous horror role of the nine-year-old orphan Esther.
Paramount Pictures has just released the first trailer for their upcoming Orphan: First Kill, a prequel to the cult-favorite 2009 horror flick Orphan. Fuhrman’s Esther looks to be terrorizing another family, but that’s kind of on them for adopting a “kid” who looks like she’s suffering through her third year of grad school. See the trailer below.
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Here’s what we know about Esther’s return in Orphan First Kill:
According to Fuhrman and the film’s director William Brent Bell, the film does not use computer generated imagery (CGI) to de-age Fuhrman for the role. The film primarily utilizes forced perspective, body doubles, and some light make-up work to bring the actress closer to the age of a role she first played when she was 12.
Using CGI to de-age actors for roles wherein they play their younger selves has been an increasingly normalized trend in big-budget films. Disney has used de-aging technology in order to recreate the younger likeness of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) in their Star Wars titles, Marvel Studios de-aged Samuel L. Jackson to portray a younger Nick Fury for the entirety of Captain Marvel, and Paramount also recently had Will Smith act opposite a de-aged “clone” of himself in the action film Gemini Man.
In Orphan’s case, the filmmakers refraining from using CGI makes some sense from a storytelling standpoint, given that the twist of the original movie was that Esther was actually 33 years old but only appeared as a nine-year-old due to a rare disorder.
Now that the audience knows she’s actually an adult, it’s not that surprising to see an actual adult portray her in close-up shots. Younger child body doubles are used in wide shots because they’ll be from the perspective of the family, who still see Esther as a child. Sort of like how Millie Bobby Brown portrayed an older Eleven in the recent Stranger Things 4 flashbacks, even if the filmmakers still used de-aging technology to show her as a kid in some scenes when she’s interacting with adults in the flashback.
The film drops in PH cinemas on July 27. In the meantime, you can catch the original Orphan currently streaming on Netflix.
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this strange new world.