It’s taken nearly four years for Case 39 to see the light of day in the U.S. Originally shot in 2006, the “new Renee Zellweger horror film” looked destined for the straight-to-video rack in your local Blockbuster. Maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad place for it.
At the start of the film, Emily Jenkins (Zellweger) is an overworked but still devoted social worker, whose supervisor drops another case on her desk–you guessed it, the 39th in the pile. When Emily pops in for a home visit, she’s convinced that there is abuse afoot. Lilith (Jodelle Ferland), the 10-year-old moppet in jeopardy, is quiet and withdrawn. Her mother (Kerry O’Malley) is a pale, shaky shell of a woman, and her father (Callum Keith Rennie) is filled with so much rage that he refuses to even talk to Emily directly.
A few days later, Emily gets a late-night call from terrified, weeping Lily. She races over to her house with a police officer buddy in tow (Ian McShane) to find the parents stuffing their daughter into the oven and duct-taping it closed. They arrest the crazy ‘rents and stash them in an insane asylum. Emily takes pity on the precocious young thing (too precocious, if you know what I mean) and decides to take her in. But then strange and terrible things start happening to Emily’s closest friends, including child psychologist Doug, her would-be love interest (Bradley Cooper, pre-Hangover). Suddenly, Emily is not so sure that it’s Lily’s parents that were crazy.
What follows is a conventional, paint-by-numbers creepy-kid flick. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, even though I’ve been burned by the genre at least twice in the last year (The Last Exorcism and Orphan). But both The Omen and The Good Son, which feature two very different kinds of terrifying tots, are on my required viewing list every October. Case 39, though, is simply too conventional to make it into the heavy rotation.
Director Christian Alvart (Pandorum) delivers the expected scares, scored by the usual supernatural thriller music. With the exception of a few cheap tricks (there are at least two harmless knocks on a door at particular tense moments) and one especially unconvincing piece of CGI that involves a legion of wasps, they aren’t bad scares. They’re just predictable ones. Even the visage of the demon child, when she briefly shows her real face has been seen before as long ago as The Devil’s Advocate.
It’s obvious that screenwriter Ray Wright, who also wrote this year’s zombies-next-door pic, The Crazies, tried to deliver a little more originality. The notion of abused parents, rather than children, turns one convention on its head. I also appreciated his choice of the little girl’s name, familiar in Judeo-Christian apocryphal lore as the name of the first succubus demon, Adam’s first wife. But those moments of wit aren’t enough to elevate Case 39’s pedestrian status.
At least Jodelle Ferland does bring her simultaneously sweet and sinister A-game. In one scene, she scares the be-Jesus out of both Doug and the entire audience with little more than an eye-roll and a smile. Zellweger, Cooper and the rest of the actors are fine–well, McShane resorts to stage-thesp puffery occasionally–but not great, as seems to be the running theme with this film.
You needn’t worry that I’ve included any spoilers in this review because there’s nothing to spoil in this humdrum, serviceable supernatural thriller. In the case of Case 39, the devil you know is just that.