Emily Jenkins (Renée Zellweger) is a Social Services worker, dealing with abused kids. She is too involved in her work to date, even though she is not exactly oblivious to her friend/child psychologist Doug (Bradley Cooper)’s attempts.
Her crazy workload however gets even crazier when she is assigned her 39th case. Lilith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland) has the typical symptoms of an abused child: dropping grades, social withdrawal, falling asleep in class…So Emily goes to talk her parents, Edward (Callum Keith Rennie) and Margaret (Kerry O’Malley) who do not seem normal or loving at all. She confides in with her boss (Adrian Lester) and her cop friend (Ian McShane) Mike but they are both unwilling to dig deeper into the case without certain proof.
However she is able to prove the abuse when she gets a terrified call from the girl. She calls Mike and rushes into the house where the parents are trying to kill her. With Mike’s arrival, they manage to arrest the parents and save the girl.
Both of course when your “villains” are sent to an institute in straight jackets pretty much in the beginning of the film, and the abused girl is just all so nice, clever and perceptive, you do know your real villain is out and about. But of course every horror/thriller has at least one stupid or extra- naïve person and in this movie it is Emily. She feels so sorry for the girl that when she insists on living with Emily, our lovely social worker petitions to make it happen. She does get to be her foster parent until new arrangements can be made and their heavenly relationship is about to get very disrupted when Lilith starts to show her true colors and endangers everyone around her.
I did call Emily naïve and stupid, because you don’t just welcome abused children into your home. I am not saying she could have seen she was a psycho but at least she should have been smart enough not to start living with a girl whose parents tried to burn her in a oven, for crying out loud! She was meant to be mentally disturbed and well, of course without Emily’s stupidity, we may not have had a story.
But then again, it would be perfectly OK not to have shot this movie. It is not bad but it is just so not necessary. And no matter how many fine actors you put in a film, supernatural horror movies usually end up being a disappointment and this one is no exception.
Oh, and if you got suspicious that Bradley Cooper’s name was credited after the little girl and Ian McShane, you were right. That was not a good sign on how much screen time Bradley would end up having in total. Written by Ray Wright, directed by Christian Alvart.2009.
6.1 on IMDB. I just might rate it slightly higher than Kevin Costner’s The New Daughter and Simon Baker’s Not Forgotten as Case 39 wasn’t that ridiculous but still, 6.1 is just too much. 5.5 from me.
The moment there was a mention of possession and demons, Case 39 just lost (bored) me.
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