This is Why Some People Don't Want Kids

Film: Case 39
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

The idea of a story about an evil child is hardly new in the movie business. Orphan, The Other, The Good Son, The Bad Seed, The Omen and plenty more have been enough to establish something of a subgenre and given us a good number of expectations. There are basically two ways this movie can go. One is that we’re led to believe that there is an evil child who turns out to be the victim of evil adults. The second is that we’re led to believe that there is an evil child who is actually evil. The big turn in this movie is always when we find out which of the two movies we’re in. In Case 39, this happens pretty early.

We’re introduced to Emily (Renée Zellweger), a social worker who deals with children in troubled situations. Up to her eyeballs with 38 cases, her boss Wayne (Adrian Lester) assigns her a 39th case, that of Lillith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland), a 10-year-old girl whose grades have suddenly slipped and who shows some signs of abuse from her parents. Emily believes that bad things are going on in the house and when she receives a panicked call from Lillith, she heads to the house with her cop friend Mike (Ian McShane). What she discovers is Lillith’s parents trying to kill her in the oven.

Naturally, there’s not a lot the Sullivans can do to keep out of a mental institution at this point, and desperate to help Lillith in any way she can, Emily takes over her caregiving. And this is where things start to go pear-shaped. Shortly after she takes custody of Lillith, another of Emily’s cases, a young boy named Diego (Alexander Conti) kills both of his parents. In the investigation, it is discovered that shortly before this, he received a call from Emily’s phone…but Emily never called him.

You can see where we’re going, right? Victims are going to start piling up. Emily’s friend and possible love interest, a therapist named Douglas Ames (Bradley Cooper) interviews Lillith, who seems a lot more precocious than her age and interrogates him right back. During the interview, Douglas realizes that he is terrified of hornets due to an experience as a child. That night, he suffers some sort of attack where he believes he is being attacked by hornets and ends up killing himself.

Ah, so it’s going to be that kind of movie. Honestly, it’s pretty evident once Diego offs his parents, and the interview scene nails it down. So, now that we know exactly what kind of film we are in, we can figure out more or less where things are going to go. The main thing is that anyone Emily might depend on for anything real has to be taken away from her, so we can figure out what’s going to happen leading up to the third act.

There are a number of things about Case 39 that should be better than they are. It’s got a solid cast, and it’s worth noting at this point in her career that Zellweger had won an Oscar and McShane had a Golden Globe. This isn’t a crew of slouches, which makes the fact that the movie really isn’t that good even more disappointing. It’s incredibly predictable, beat for beat from the moment we learn about Diego’s parents. Sure, the details might be different from movie to movie in this genre, but what happens in broad strokes is always going to be the same. The actual ending—the last few minutes of the movie—border on the ridiculous.

The truth is that Case 39 is exactly the movie that you think it’s going to be once you’re through the first act. There’s nothing wrong with tropes; people like tropes because it makes it easy to follow the story and we get the reward/payoff that we want with genre conventions. It is disappointing when they are followed to this extent, though. This is especially the case when the film is this long. I know that I rail about film length sometimes, but Case 39 would be a better film in a 90-95 minute package instead of nearly 110 minutes, including a very short credit sequence. This needed a serious trim—it wouldn’t make the film better, but it would at least feel like it spent a lot less time getting to where everyone knew it was going to go.

Why to watch Case 39: The "kid in the oven" sequence is a real high point.
Why not to watch: Once you know what movie you’re watching, there are no surprises.