As a preface: SPOILERS! WATCH OUT!
What truly impressed me in this movie was Isabelle Fuhrman's acting. The girl is only twelve or thirteen, yet she pulls off nine and thirty three with equal aplomb. You see, the twist is that Ester is in fact a grown woman, a proportional dwarf masquerading as a nine year old girl. Now, this sounds patently ridiculous, as quite a few Internet sources have noted, but I feel Fuhrman gave a strong enough performance to make her secret believable.
Through almost the entire first act, Ester comes across as almost too sweet, and one finds one's self almost rooting for her, despite knowing that she MUST be evil. After a girl at school is particularly cruel to her, pushing her off a jungle-gym seems not only excusable but justified. However, Ester's rage intensifies as the movie progresses, and her transgressions get more and more serious, and correspondingly less well-thought-out, until she can disguise her true intentions no longer. Fuhrman gives Ester a snarl that slowly emerges through her East European accent as she begins her siege on the family, using their spotted history to turn them against each other until it is almost too late.
Additionally, I felt Vera Farmiga was excellent. She plays Ester's adopted mother, who lost her third child while it was still in the womb. She descends into suffering as Ester escalates into manic insanity, matching her in violence until they battle in the final act. In fact, one of the most shocking scenes in the movie is not due to Ester, but when Kate slaps her. She must be physically restrained from beating Ester, and this rage from a "good" character is quite jarring.
However, a few things did bother me about the movies. The reason Ester wears ribbons on her throat and wrists is to cover scars she recieved from her straight jacket when she was in the mental instituation, but these scars look more like cutting scars, rather than the abrassion marks one would get from rubbing fabric. I think they had these scars mostly for the sake of misdirection, really, and for visual effect.
In fact, I felt quite a few things in the movie were done mainly for mood, sacrificing logic. For instance, Ester likes to paint, but her seemingly innocent pictures are, when shown under blacklight, to contain twisted hidden images, such as burning children or heaqds on pikes. Now, these day-glow ciphers were certanly interesting and spooky, the whole thing seemed a bit too hoodoo-magic to fit with the logic of the rest of the film. I mean, did she own a blacklight in the orphanage? However, it did make for a great closing credits sequence.
B+
