Most of the limited enjoyment that resides in Christian Alvart’s Case 39, a mediocre supernatural thriller that’s been rightfully sitting on the shelf for two years awaiting release, comes from imagining the lead players portraying their best known characters in the midst of this fetid, compliant feature about a social worker who rescues a preternaturally sweet child from what she believes to be monstrous parents only to find that she chose very, very badly.
So Renee Zellweger was not Emily Jenkins, a dedicated doer of good, rather she was Bridget Jones. (Sample diary entry: 'November 5 – calories consumed: 420, cigarettes smoked: 0, demonic children in my house who can read minds: 1, friends who bloodily killed themselves without warning: 8 and rising fast.") Ian McShane was not grizzled Portland police detective Mike Barron, but rather Deadwood’s expletive-laden frontier magnate Al Swearengen. In the same vein, Bradley Cooper’s sensitive psychologist, Douglas Ames, who runs group therapy sessions for troubled kids, was actually flippant jackass Phil Wenneck from The Hangover ('Hey, tiny child demon, love your work, but I’m outta here).
The cast too may well have spent their days on set daydreaming about better days, because there’s little in Case 39 to divert them. Demon seed movies are a genre all to themselves, but there’s little of the gusto that made an entry from earlier this year, Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Orphan, such an enjoyable diversion into domestic mayhem. The mood is generally inert and there’s no psychological edge to Alvart’s set-ups, no sense of looming hysteria or the subtle disruption of reality. That the movie has to use generic helicopter shots of a city grid for the credit sequence is a good indication of the mundane wares on offer.
Despite the nutty turns from Callum Keith Rennie and Kerry O’Malley as the parents with mortal intentions, it’s soon clear that Lillith (Jodelle Ferland) is no mere troubled child. She expertly plays on Emily’s emotions and soon has the professional engaging in personal endeavours. 'I’m just not mum material," protests the social worker, and the story proceeds to punish her for trying to assume the role in a de facto manner. If there’s a subtext to Case 39 it’s that career women should not be seduced by personal feelings as it will just ruin their lives. Lillith, naturally, makes this explicit. A little boy in her therapy group murders his parents and soon everyone around Emily starts succumbing to hallucinations that end with them killing themselves in a bid to find relief.
The film can’t rise above the perfunctory, but at this level that should still allow a degree of professionalism. But Zellweger’s performance is a mess – she can’t sustain her character’s descent into a nightmare from shot to shot. What’s worse is that the film breaks the cardinal rule of the supernatural genre: whatever bizarre event may transpire, it needs to adhere to the storyline’s internal logic. In Case 39, whether because no-one noticed or no-one simply cared, the rules keep changing. If it’s so difficult for Lillith’s parents to dispose of her, why is it so easy for Emily? Not even Bridget Jones got such a lucky break.
