Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), the demon child of the 2009 horror thriller “Orphan,” was a 9-year-old psycho freak who dressed like a frumpy Victorian doll and spoke in a Russian accent, which upped the ante on her malevolence by making her seem not just a junior devil but a junior devil from the land of Putin.
Movies about monster children go way back, and after “The Omen” and “The Brood” and “Ringu” and so many others, there wasn’t a lot of room left for a pulp horror film like “Orphan” to surprise us.
But the movie, in its schlocky blunderbuss way, did have an original twist: Esther was not, in fact, 9 years old — she was a woman in her early 30s named Leena who had a rare hormonal disorder that stunted her physical development.
The folly of “Orphan” is that it wasn’t much different from the film it would have
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