Esther Coleman/Leena Klammer was the main character and villainess in the movie, Orphan. She was portrayed by Isabelle Fuhrman.
Biography[]
Leena suffered from a pituitary disorder that caused her to be a proportional dwarf. Because she was physically not quite a grown woman and not quite a child, it was hard for her to have an adult relationship with a "Normal" man which was one of the things that she yearned for. She was sexually abused by her father from infancy. When her father took a new sexual partner on, he informed Leena that it was because she would "Never be a real woman". She was pushed into insanity and killed her father and his girlfriend. She was subsequently caught and eventually placed in a mental institution which was the Saarne Institute. Eventually, she managed to escape and unknowingly continued to allow herself to be abused by becoming a prostitute for years. When the police caught her, she pretended to be a child to avoid jail time and was sent to the orphanage where she found her first family of victims and moved on to the Colemans.
Leena was one of the Saarne's most violent patients by forcing the staff to keep her in a straightjacket that she was constantly fighting to get out of. She continued struggling against her restraints and it caused the scars on her wrists and neck. So, to cover these, she wore the ribbons. She escaped from the hospital and tricked an American family that was called the Sullivan family into adopting her. Eventually, she tried to seduce the father and when that failed, she killed him and his family and set fire to the house. After this, she was taken in by an American orphanage where she eventually met the Colemans. Leena was continuing her efforts to find romantic/physical love in the only form that she understood which was a father figure.
Becoming part of the Coleman Family[]
After an unfortunate miscarriage, the young married couple, Kate and John Coleman, visit a local orphanage in an effort to help their family recover from losing the baby. It was here that they met a young orphan girl named "Esther". She easily charmed them with her kind personality and affinity for art. After some consideration, the two decided to adopt her, bringing Esther into their family.
Esther leaving the orphanage with John and Kate
The Coleman's younger daughter named Max, who is deaf and communicates with sign language embraced Esther almost immediately, due to Esther’s own knowledge of sign language. Their older son, Daniel, however takes a lot less of a liking to Esther.
In the middle of the night, Esther goes to the door outside of the kitchen and witnesses walked Kate and John having sex. Kate enters Esther’s room the next day trying to explain what happened, Esther calmly says, "I know, they fuck”. This takes Kate back a bit as she was not expecting a girl of her age to know about such a mature subject and especially not the kind of language that comes along with it. Kate feeling concerned wanted to bring her to a therapist named Dr. Browning. John, however opposed it as he didn’t see it as that big of a deal.
Esther's first day at school was not easy for her as a classmate named Brenda teased Esther about her odd clothes. A few days later, Brenda teased Esther once again for carrying a Bible to school and threw it and had some pages fall out of it. As Esther tried to quickly pick the pages up, Brenda noticed the ribbon on her neck and tried to grab it. Esther freaked out and screamed. Later, Esther saw Brenda at the playground and pushed her off a slide by breaking Brenda's ankle. Max saw Esther shove the girl, but covered for Esther by saying that the girl slipped.
Sister Abigail who was the head of the orphanage warned Kate and John about Esther's tendency to be around when things went wrong. Esther overheard this and killed Sister Abigail by bludgeoning her with a hammer. She forced Max to help her hide the body and the hammer. Daniel saw Esther and Max descending from his treehouse from behind a rock not knowing that they hid the hammer there. Later on that night, Esther threatened to cut Daniel's genitals off if he told anyone what he saw.
Kate was told that the Russian orphanage that Esther came from had no records about her ever being there. Searching her room, Kate found Esther's Bible and saw an inscription by declaring that the book was the property of the Saarne Institute. Confusing her even more, Kate found out that Saarne was in Estonia, not Russia as all of Esther's paperwork stated. Realizing that Kate was closer to figuring her secret out, Esther decided to torment Kate even more by picking the flowers from Jessica's (Kate's stillborn daughter) grave. Kate grabbed Esther's arm to get the flowers back and Esther ran away with a scream. Later on that night, Esther snuck into John's work area, broke her own arm in a vase and convinced John that Kate broke it. In the meantime, Kate discovered that Saarne was not an orphanage, but a mental institution.
Esther watches as Daniel tries to escape the tree house she set on fire
Daniel learned about the hammer from Max and decided to get it and go to the police. However, Esther settled the treehouse on fire by intending to get rid of the evidence and kill Daniel. Daniel escaped by falling out of the tree by severely injuring his neck and knocking him unconscious. Esther tried to finish him off by smashing a rock over his head, but Max shoved her out of the way just in time. Esther tried to kill him again at the hospital by unhooking his respirator and attempting to smother him with a pillow by placing him in a near-fatal coma. The doctors rushed into the room and managed to save Daniel.
An action shot- Kate slaps Esther in the hospital and swears at her.
Outside, Kate angrily hit Esther by calling her a bitch and was subdued and sedated by the doctors. John left with Esther and Max to go home while Kate slumped into unconsciousness again. On that night, Esther tried to seduce a drunk and dazed John who finally realized that Kate was right to be suspicious about her. John threatened to call the orphanage about her and told her to stop her behavior and go to her room. Esther went upstairs by holding her tears back until she reached her room and was submitted to a deep and heartbroken crying spell before losing her temper and tearing her room up in a rage. She also took all of her makeup, her prosthetic dentures, the bandages that covered her breasts, her collar and the ribbons on her wrists and neck off.
Leena without her "Esther" makeup
Esther changed her outfit again, dressing herself in Kate’s clothes, fitting to her true age. Opposing the colourful dresses and pigtails, Leena, formerly known as Esther, tied her hair back and put on a black shirt with jeans. John went up to comfort her and discovered her disturbing artwork in her dark, now-ransacked and empty room. Shortly after, the electricity was shut off. When he went downstairs to investigate, Leena caught him from behind and stabbed him several times. Then, she spotted Max who was watching at the top of the stairs.
As the now-widowed Kate was coming out of sedation, she got a call from the Saarne Institute's director named Dr. Varava who revealed to her that Esther was not a 9 year old girl at all, but a 33 year old woman named Leena Klammer. She had hypopituitarism which was a disorder that stunted her physical growth and spent most of her life as a serial killer by posing as a little girl.
When Kate got home, she was finally pushed over the edge after discovering her husband dead. Kate went looking for Max and got shot by Leena with the revolver that she found in the house in the process. Kate finally found Max in the greenhouse while she peered down from the roof. She broke the glass and fell on top of Leena just before she could shoot Max. When Leena appeared unconscious, Kate took Max and ran away from the house. Leena ran after Kate by trying to kill her and Max with a knife. Their chase took them to a frozen pond where Kate and Leena struggled on the ice. Max grabbed Leena's snub-nosed revolver and tried to shoot her, but missed by causing the ice to shatter. Leena and Kate fell into the freezing water. Kate crawled out of the hole and was followed by Leena. Concealing a knife behind her back, Leena latches herself onto Kate’s leg. In a final attempt to kill her, she tries to play on Kate’s motherly instincts by saying “Don't let me die mommy”. The desperate Kate screams back "I am not your fucking Mommy!" and kicks Leena in the face, breaking her neck, causing her to sink back into the freezing water where she presumably drowned.
Victims[]
- Unknown father.
- Her father's girlfriend.
- The Sullivan family.
- Yolanda (A girl that John and Kate are going to adopt before Esther in the early draft of the script, not included in the film).
- Sister Abigail.
- John Coleman.
- Daniel, Kate And Max (In the early draft of the script, she succeeded in killing him). Though she doesn't directly in either draft, knowing how badly Max and Kate are damaged, Kate is certain to have taken hers and Max's lives eventually in said early draft.
Trivia[]
- A huge amount of Esther's backstory was omitted from the film. The background was still in the script version of the movie which also had Esther killing a girl named Yolanda and successfully killing Daniel and John and attempting to kill Max and Kate but was ultimately shot by Kate. Knowing their mental damages from Leena though, Kate certainly eventually took her life post taking Max's in early draft.