Good news! We are soon to be blessed with a prequel to 2009’s wildly entertaining and underrated domestic thriller Orphan, in which (spoiler alert) it is revealed that a family’s seemingly 9-year-old adopted daughter is actually a 33-year-old woman with dwarfism. And you know what? I feel like I deserve this.
Deadline reports that William Brent Bell (The Boy and its imminent sequel) has been tapped to direct Esther, from a script written by David Coggeshall (who wrote for Scream: The TV Series, among things). The capsule description is as follows:
In it, Lena Klammer orchestrates a brilliant escape from a Russian psychiatric facility and travels to America by impersonating the missing daughter of a wealthy family. But Lena’s new life as “Esther” comes with an unexpected wrinkle and pits her against a mother who will protect her family at any cost.
The announcement of this follow-up to an 11-year-old B-movie seems rather auspicious. Last year, the story of Natalia Grace Barnett entranced the internet. It read like a carbon-copy retelling of Orphan: Grace’s adoptive parents Kristine and Michael Barnett thought they had adopted a 6-year-old Ukrainian girl in 2010, whom they claimed was a fully grown adult with dwarfism. They were charged with neglect and abandonment. Grace’s birth mother chimed in to say she was definitely a child. So did Natalia Grace. The Barnetts’ separate trials are set to start in June and July.
Esther is set to film later this year.