Dir. Christian Alvart, 109mins, USA, 2009
Cast: Renee Zellweger, Ian McShane, Jodelle Ferland, Bradley Cooper, Callum Keith Rennie, Adrian Lester
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Creepy kid movies are a horror sub-genre possessed with some of the most successfully scary demon spawn. The Exorcist and The Omen feature the classic ankle biting monsters, but we also have the underachieving cherubs of The Orphan, Bless the Child, and Godsend. Case 39 has been filed away in distribution hell for a while, but the star wattage of Renee Zellweger and the white hot Bradley Cooper means we now have another B-movie schlocker to add to the list, and you know what, in a rubbishy, seen-it-all-before kinda way, it's not that bad.
Zellweger is Emily Jenkins, a social worker that takes on more cases than she can handle, the 39 th of which is Lillith Sullivan (Ferland), a butter wouldn't melt schoolgirl who appears to be the victim of some vile abuse at the hands of her shifty parents. Acting above, and somewhat inappropriately beyond the call of duty, Emily rescues her from the fate of her tormentors only to find that the problem may not have been the parents after all.
Case 39 does a few things right that almost threaten to make it a recommendation. All important to the entire story is the effectiveness of the child actor, and in Jodelle Ferland they have a little terror that definitely has the chill factor. Shark-eyed in appearance she uneasily shifts between unnervingly cute to confidently terrifying, a veteran of the genre with appearances in Silent Hill and Stephen King TV oddity, Kingdom Hospital, she will genuinely give you the willies.
The grown-ups aren't so great; it's a stretch to accept Zellweger as a child carer, and once the set-up is out of the way she is required to do little but screech and scrunch up her face. Cooper too is miscast as a child psychologist and his fate is signposted from the minute he charismatically steps onscreen.
There are moments of unintentional hilarity that yank you from the occasionally plodding narrative, but that said, there are also some effective little sequences. Amongst the lazy “things that go bump in the night” jumps you have the Hansel and Gretel method of child torture that is claustrophobically cruel, and then there's the best use of bees since Macaulay Culkin bought it at the end of My Girl.
Ultimately this is like an average episode of The X-Files without an original trick up its sleeve, but it will still become an enjoyable rental above most other titles of the same predictable ilk.
|
