99 min | R | August 19, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
Thirteen years before the events of the original, Leena Klammer escapes a psychiatric facility in Estonia and assumes the identity of a wealthy American family’s missing daughter. The con works until the family turns out to have secrets of its own. The twist is clever. The movie around it is not.
Leena Klammer is a grown woman with a hormonal disorder that keeps her body looking like a child’s. She breaks out of an institution and steals the identity of Esther Albright, a girl who vanished years earlier. The Albright family welcomes her home to Connecticut. This is a prequel that exists to explain a character who already worked fine without explanation. The film knows the original’s reveal, so it spends its runtime building toward a second twist that recontextualizes the homecoming.
Isabelle Fuhrman plays Leena at twenty-five after originating the role at twelve. The novelty is real. She uses body doubles and forced perspective to sell the illusion, and her face does the heavy lifting in close-up. Julia Stiles plays Tricia Albright, the mother, and she finds a colder register than the script deserves. Matthew Finlan plays the brother Gunnar as a sneering rich kid with no interior life. Rossif Sutherland plays the father Allen as a soft mark who never registers as a person.
William Brent Bell directs from a script by David Coggeshall. The most interesting choice is the digital de-aging applied to Fuhrman’s skin and the way the cinematography leans on long lenses to compress her against adult actors. The early Estonia sequences have a grimy institutional texture that the film abandons once it reaches the Albright mansion. After that the visual language flattens into glossy thriller lighting. The score telegraphs every reveal instead of trusting the images to do it.
The second-act turn is the only idea here, and the film treats it as enough. Once the surprise lands, the story has nowhere left to go but blood. Fuhrman commits to a part that should not work and almost makes the gimmick feel like craft. Everyone around her is serving a premise that did not need to exist.