After hearing about the twist and looking closely at the picture of Esther realizing "Holy shit she does have age marks!"
There's a lot that will make you say "holy shit!" on a second viewing. Why does she prefer to wear Victorian dresses over blue jeans? To hide her more "adult" figure. Her avoidance of doctor and dentist appointments. "I've had a lot of time to practice, I guess." "She's very mature for her age." There are even subtler moments like when Kate is yelling for Esther to hurry up on her first day of school...perhaps she was taking so long because she was putting on all her makeup.
Here's a subtle one: Danny notices Esther cuts her food into little pieces before eating anything. It could just be her style of eating, but it makes a lot more sense when you find out that she's wearing false teeth and eating with them in would probably be very difficult without cutting things very small.
Esther's pretending to be Russian makes even more sense when you take in her actual age as Leena. Leena was born in what was still the Soviet Union, meaning she could very likely have gone to a Russian school and been fluent in the language. Estonia is a very tiny country, especially in population, and by saying that she's from Russia that gives a huge amount of possible ground to cover in finding out where Leena's actually from. Meanwhile she wouldn't have to worry about being questioned in Russian because that was a state language.
In First Kill, Leena's cover story of being a missing American girl kidnapped at five, discovered four years later in a foreign country, and reunited with her family doesn't attract any visible media attention, even though it would make a great news headline. No reporters come to the Albright house to ask for an interview or get a photo. Of course the story wouldn't get into the news; Tricia probably did everything in her power to make sure it didn't get out. She knew "Esther" was an imposter from the beginning, and Leena was already acting in small ways that were giving away that she wasn't Esther — for example, saying she couldn't wait to meet the grandma who she should have known was already dead. Having the public's eye on the Albright family would increase the chances that someone (extended family, police, the therapist, amateur sleuths, etc.) would realize Leena was an imposter. And if the truth that Leena wasn't Esther came out, people would start asking why the Albrights accepted her as if she was, which could have led to the truth being uncovered about how the real Esther died. There was no way Tricia was going to risk dealing with all that. Better to keep everything hush-hush.
Leena's "parents" take her to a child therapist, who the real Esther also visited before she disappeared. She was only five. For what reason would a child so young need a therapist? Given Gunnar's weird behavior — acting like a psychopath and clearly not feeling too guilty about killing his own sister — it's not hard to guess why she would need special help. Psychopaths don't just abuse their siblings, they basically torture them, just like animals. This makes Tricia look even worse, as it implies that she covered up Gunnar's abuse of his real sister.
After Gunnar discovers who Leena is and tries to use it to blackmail her, he looms over her and says "I fucking own you." His tone of voice sounds disturbingly like an abusive boyfriend telling his girlfriend he can do whatever he wants to her. Could he have been planning to do something worse to her? Especially considering the hints that he was abusive to the real Esther when she was just a preschooler, and (if Leena's backstory from the script is taken as canon) the fact that Leena was sexually abused by her own father in the past.
The scene where Esther goes to the hospital for her broken arm. In real life, the doctors would have easily discovered the bones belonged to an adult dwarf and not a little girl.
Not necessarily. In the real-life 2010 case, which was unfortunately probably inspired by this movie, doctors were unable to determine Natalia’s age from orthopedic or dental scans. Authorities had to use the age of Natalia’s biological mother to conclude that Natalia was telling the truth about her age (otherwise, her mother would have been ten years old when she was born). They had to do that because medical evidence had failed.
How did Esther arrive at the American orphanage without having been brought by someone? Even if she forged her paperwork, she couldn't just show up at the door with it by herself. And how did she manage to avoid medical exams the whole time she was there?
Well now we have Orphan First Kill to explain that how she was brought to an American orphanage. She impersonated a missing child of a rich American family, and after killing the family and burning down their house, she was "found" by the police and firefighters, and taken to an orphanage
In the prequel, what was Tricia's long-term plan for keeping Leena around as a cover for Esther's murder? Eventually, people, first of all Allen, would notice "Esther" wasn't aging and it'd be almost impossible to stage Leena's death without inviting any suspicion—any benefit of the doubt they've run on from the "disappearance" would likely evaporate instantly the "second" time Esther was subject to an incident.
Under the body binding, it was shown Leena did have a more mature and adult figure than the Victorian dresses made it seem like. Some girls remain petite and very young-looking even through puberty, so as long as her figure seemed to be developing and she was menstruating, it would have been easy just pass her off as just one of those teens who remains looking young for a very long time. Tricia could have even gone one step further and pretended to take "Esther" to doctors appointments while getting papers forged to show Allen and anyone else who asked that everything was fine with her daughter. Presumably, the ruse could have been terminated when "Esther" legally turned eighteen. Tricia could have simply paid Leena a very large amount of money to move far away to do what she wanted, even if that was to pull the orphan ruse again with a new family, and then just make an occasional phone call home to prove to Allen everything was alright with her. "Esther" wouldn't have been the first teen to simply want to live her own life apart from her family.
