- Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
- Written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Alex Mace
- StarsVera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman
- Run Time: 2 Hours, 3 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhziUAHlQf8
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Does adoption in movies ever have a happy ending? Not here, either. It’s probably not a spoiler knowing that going into this. Still, the child actress in the main role is amazing, and the supporting kids are good. The story unfolds nicely and overall it’s very well done.
Synopsis
Kate and John walk into the emergency room; she’s about to give birth. It looks really painful, and then there’s a_ bunch_ of blood. The doctors aren’t very nice about her dead baby inside her; John’s there with his video camera recording the removal. They pull out a mummified, screaming thing… And Kate wakes up. Yes, she lost her baby, but it wasn’t that bad. Still, it happened, and she’s got the scar to prove it. She’s still dealing with the grief and trauma.
She talks to Dr. Browning, her psychiatrist, about adopting. Kate already has a small daughter, Max, who is deaf, and a son, Daniel, who is just annoying. They go to St. Marian’s Home for Girls to adopt another one. John finds a girl named Esther who is really good at painting but doesn’t get along well with the other kids. Sister Abigail says that the family that brought Esther to America died in a fire. Three weeks later, Esther goes home with them.
Pretty much immediately, Daniel gets jealous of the attention Esther is getting on her first day. He and his friends go up in their treehouse and look at porno books.
Esther wears frilly, old-fashioned looking dresses, and she definitely stands out. “Little Bo Peep” comments are made at school. We see several examples that show us that Esther is a weird kid. For some reason, John and Kate decide to have sex in the kitchen one night, and Esther catches them in the act. Esther understands more about the act than she should at her age.
At the park, a neighbor woman flirts with John, but Esther only has eyes for Brenda, her nemesis from school. Max watches as Esther pushes Brenda off the big slide and breaks her leg. Later, Max lies to defend Esther. Daniel still doesn’t like Esther, and he makes that abundantly clear.
Kate starts teaching Esther to play the piano, but she already knows. There are lies, half-truths, and innuendo. Sister Abigail comes for a visit; she thinks there may be something wrong with Esther. She’s done more research, and accidental injuries seem to follow Esther around. The house fire that killed her previous family was an unsolved arson. Naturally, Esther is listening to all this. John takes Esther’s side, but Kate’s not so sure anymore.
Esther finds John’s pistol, locked in the gun safe. She and Max wait at the bridge; Esther says they’re going to “scare” Sister Abigail. The plan is to have Max wave the car down, but when the time comes Ester gives her a shove out into the road. Abigail swerves and spins out into the shoulder. When she gets out to check on Max, Esther whacks the old nun with a hammer. The two little girls pull her off the road and finish the job. Well, Esther does while Max watches horrified.
Daniel watches the two girls leaving his treehouse, and later that night, Esther puts a knife to his throat and swears him to secrecy. Kate takes Esther to Dr. Browning for an evaluation, and the doctor falls for everything Esther says. Kate gets a call, one of the nuns wants to know what happened to Abigail; she never came home yesterday. They soon find her car and the mutilated body.
Kate starts Googling “Children who kill.” John thinks Kate is losing her mind. Kate tries to find some history on Esther, but the orphanage she was in back in Russia doesn’t know anything about her. Esther doesn’t want to go to the dentist. John tells Esther to do something nice for Kate, but that goes really badly.
Later, Esther breaks her own arm in a vise and goes crying to John. It looks like Kate broke her arm in anger. Kate, a recovering alcoholic, buys two bottles of wine but then dumps the open onel in the sink. John finds the unopened bottle and assumes that Kate drank. Dr. Browning, the world’s worst psychiatrist, takes John and Esther’s side of the story.
Daniel and Max are both terrified of Esther, but they regularly cover for her out of fear. Max tells Daniel about the evidence stashed in the treehouse, but Esther overhears all. Esther drops all pretense of being normal when she reads Kate’s diary. Later, Kate reads Esther’s bible, from the Saarne Institute. Turns out, Saarne isn’t an orphanage, it’s a mental hospital.
Esther sets the treehouse and the evidence on fire– with Daniel inside. He jumps out, and before Esther can finish him off, Max intervenes. Daniel winds up in the hospital with internal injuries. Esther sneaks away and smothers Daniel in his hospital bed. The hospital people sedate Kate, so John takes Esther and Max home. Daniel may pull through after all.
That night, John drinks quite a bit while Esther cuts up one of Kate’s dresses. She looks like a ten-year-old Russian hooker as she comes onto John, kissing him all over. “You said you loved me!” she whines. He’s not that drunk, so he explains how he loves Kate. John finally realizes that Kate may have been right.
In the hospital, Kate gets a call from the Saarne Institute. The doctor tells her to get her family away from the little girl, who is really a grown woman. She has a rare hormone disorder with proportional dwarfism. She’s 33 years old. Kate leaves the hospital and rushes home in the snowstorm. She calls 911 and sends them to the house.
Meanwhile, Esther stabs John half a dozen times, and he’s not gonna recover from that. Max watches the whole thing and then hides. Kate arrives, but by this point, Esther has dad’s gun again. Esther, Kate, and Max play tag in the greenhouse. Kate ends up jumping through the roof and squashing Esther like a bug. They run off to the woods instead of the road for some reason as they hear the police coming.
The police do not find Esther’s body. Esther attacks Kate in the woods, and they crawl out onto the frozen pond. Ester has the upper hand with a knife. Max picks up the dropped gun and aims for Ester but shoots the ice. They both fall through the ice, and Esther stabs Kate. Kate kicks Esther in the face and she drowns under the ice… at least it looks that way.
Commentary
Isabelle Fuhrman, the actress who played Esther, was actually only ten years old when this was made. She was really good here.
Kevin theorized early on that Esther was a full-grown woman in disguise, pretending to be a child. He was basically right, and one hint after another supported him.
It’s pretty long, and may have one or two plotlines that it didn’t need to have, but it was entertaining throughout.