I guess I'm just different?

Rating: 7/10 (7 August 2009)

**SPOILERS** After her newborn child-who was to be named Jeniffer-died during a failed delivery at the hospital the mother Kate Coleman, Vera Farmia, went into a deep depression and started to hit the bottle.
It's now two years later and both Kate an her husband John, Peter Sarsgaard, adopt nine year-old Esther, Isabelle Fuhrman, from a local Catholic orphanage in the hope she'll replaced Jenniffer; The daughter that they never had the chance of knowing. As things were to turn out this was to become a big big mistake on the part of the unsuspecting Colemans! Esther was not what she at first seemed to be but it would take a number of horrific incidents for the Coleman's to finally realize it! But by them it may well have been to late for them and their two young children the deft and mute Maxine, Aryana Engineer, and Danny, Jimmy Bennett, as well as anyone else who just happened to get in Esther's way! Including the Sister Superior of the orphanage that Esther came from Sister Abigal,CCH Pounder.
Even though the film is compared to "The Omem" and "the Bad Seed" it's really a one of a kind horror flick where you don't realize-like in the previous two child horror films-what's behind sweet little Esther's horrid actions! That's until the shocking secret of her past is reviled, from far off Estonia no less, to the audience as well as Kate that comes to light in the last ten or so minutes left in the movie!
***SPOILER ALERT*** There's something very strange about Esther and you notice it almost as soon as you, and the Coleman's, meet her at the orphanage! She's pretty smart even, when she wants to be, adoring but there's something very unnerving about her in how unusually mature, both in knowledge and emotion, she is for nine year-old girl. That something is what Esther has been keeping under raps, or better yet ribbons, all throughout the movie! It's a little something that she took with her out for her home in Estonia, not Russia like she has people think, that will reveal the true nature of her character as well as mental state!
Extremely disturbing movie that has as it's villain, little Esther, one of the most cold blooded and manipulative psycho killers in motion picture history! It's not that Esther is at first a sweet and innocent-looking child. It's that she's just too perfect in both committing and covering up the horrors that she perpetrates in the film! Like she's had from previous experience in doing these same horrible acts before!
It's Kate who starts to put the missing pieces of the puzzle together in just who Esther really is and how she's been so successful in covering up her past! A cover-up that even fooled Esther's, or the Coleman family, psychiatrist Dr Browning, Margo Mantindale. It's later when Esther tries to silence Kate, by having her declared insane or murdered, that even her very naive husband John finally realizes just what he's up against! Something or someone that he, and almost every one else in the film, had been completely fooled by! But with John now totally out of it, by Esther getting him drunk, and coming face to face with this unspeakable horror he is in no condition to fight it!