Plot Details

The film details the adoption

Adoption

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents...

 of an eight-year-old girl named Jody (Gabrielle Boni) by a loving couple, Don (William Katt

William Katt

William Theodore Katt is an American film and television actor, best known as the star of The Greatest American Hero. He is also known for playing Tommy Ross, the ill-fated prom date of Carrie White in the film version of Carrie and Paul Drake Jr. in the Perry Mason TV movies...

) and Barbara Mitchell (Michele Greene

Michele Greene

Michele Dominguez Greene is an American actress, singer, and songwriter, perhaps most well-known for her role as attorney Abigail "Abby" Perkins in L.A. Law from 1986 - 1991. She returned to that role in 2002 for the TV "reunion" film L.A...

). Jody develops an obsession with her father and paranoia and jealousy about others spending time with him. This leads her to become psychopathic

Psychopathy

Psychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others, and are very disproportionately responsible for violent crime...

 and so envious of his relationships with other people she sets out to remove these people from her father's life. Early in the movie, she kills her principal when the woman suggests that Jody may need to be placed in a state-run boarding school, where she will only see her father on weekends, because of her behavior problems. Jody tricks the principal into standing on a chair to retrieve a book from a high shelf, Jody then pushes the chair out from under her principal, and proceeds to tip the bookcase over onto her prostrate form. Later, after unsuccessfully trying to poison her grandmother, Jody suggests a game of hide-and-seek with her grandma. Intuitively, Jody places a cassette recording of her crying out for help in a potted plant at the base of the stairs. The grandma

Grandparent

Grandparents are the parents of a person's own parent, whether that be a father or a mother. Every sexually-reproducing creature who is not a genetic chimera has a maximum of four genetic grandparents, eight genetic great-grandparents, sixteen genetic great-great-grandparents, etc...

, already having ventured up the stairs after failing to find Jody on the first level, becomes alarmed when she hears Jody's cries and hurries to the threshold of the staircase, calling to Jody. Jody takes her carefully orchestrated opportunity to shove her grandma down the stairs, her frail bones splintering and breaking until she reaches the bottom. The grandmother survives the fall, but goes into a coma. She is later killed in the hospital when Jody sabotages her ventilator. Later, Jody kills her mother's friend, as Jody had overheard the friend advising her mother to divorce her father. During the course of the film, Jody's foster cousin, Karen (Roxana Zal

Roxana Zal

Roxana Zal is an American actress.Zal was born and raised in Malibu, California, the daughter of Maureen and Hossein Zal, a Los Angeles investor. She was on her High School tennis team. Her first acting role was a guest spot on Hart to Hart at age 12. She has had several other guest roles since...

), who has been staying with the family, becomes suspicious of the recent deaths in the area. She begins investigating Jody's past, and discovers that as a toddler, Jody witnessed the murder of her biological father by her biological mother, and that she had been removed from her previous foster home when her foster father was convicted of murder after his wife was killed by being pushed down the stairs in a manner suspiciously similar to that of Jody's recently deceased foster-grandmother. This causes Karen to alert social services. At the end of the film, Jody pushes her adoptive mother Barbara over the edge of a balcony

Balcony

Balcony , a platform projecting from the wall of a building, supported by columns or console brackets, and enclosed with a balustrade.-Types:The traditional Maltese balcony is a wooden closed balcony projecting from a...

, but this does not kill her mother. When the social worker arrives at Jody's home, Jody bashes his head with a heavy meat tenderizing mallet, killing him. Jody's father Don arrives home to find the body of the social worker, and his wife injured on the ground. Karen called 911 after finding the social worker's body. After seeing what she has done and disgusted at her mental derangement, Don refuses to comfort the crying, begging child. The movie closes with Jody crying that everyone is against her, wanting her father to love her and comfort her, but he does not.