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WARNING: Here Be Spoilers <<<
Trivia items below here contain information that may give away important plot points. You may not want to read any further if you've not already seen this title.
- SPOILER: In earlier drafts of the script, Esther's attempt to kill Daniel in
the hospital is successful.
- SPOILER: In earlier drafts of the script, Esther pins the murder of Sister
Abigail on a homeless man in the park by hiding a grocery bag containing the
bloody hammer and personal items from Abigail's car among the man's
possessions.
- SPOILER: Earlier drafts of the script include more information about
Esther's past and explain why she attempts to seduce her adoptive fathers:
- She was molested by her father for years, starting when she was an infant; this sexualized her at a very young age and destroyed any future chance of her having her own children. Her father later took another lover, telling Esther that, because of her condition, she could never be a real woman. She murdered them both.
- She worked as a prostitute in Estonia for years, catering to wealthy pedophiles. When she was arrested for this, she kept up the pretense of being a child to stay out of jail and was sent to an orphanage.
- Esther sees herself as trapped inside the body of a child, and it disgusts her. She wants to "grow up" and be a wife, a mother, and a lover (what her father considered a "real woman"), and tries to find "love" where she thought she'd had it as a child, with her new father.
- SPOILER: The film seems to have been loosely inspired by the case of Treva
Throneberry, a woman who conned social services from various states into
believing she was an orphaned teenager well into her late twenties.
- SPOILER: In earlier drafts of the script, Kate and John go to the orphanage not to see girls for the first time, but to bring presents to Yolanda, a 7-year-old Puerto Rican girl whom they plan on taking home the next day. There, they meet Esther (this scene plays out almost exactly as it does in the actual movie). Although she impresses them, especially John, she finds out that they've already adopted Yolanda. The next morning, Sister Judith finds Yolanda hung in a closet; it's assumed that she died in a kids game gone wrong, but implied that Esther killed her. John later suggests to Kate that they adopt Esther instead.