Review:Cast 39
Cast: Renee Zellweger, Jodelle Ferland
Direction: Christian Alvart
Rating: * 1/2
Inadvertently perhaps, Case 39, makes a plea against child adoption. Because here good old Renee Zellweger, as a do-gooder social worker, goes through the kind of trauma you wouldn’t wish on anyone dead or alive. And it’s all a consequence of her tender heart that goes out to a 10-year-old girl (Ferland) who is being abused by her parents. Believe you this, they want to bake the girl alive!
Our heroine rushes to the rescue of the moppet, takes her home, violating the principle of not getting emotionally involved on the job. The tension mounts, even as the plot becomes creepier and crawlier by the minute. There are shades of the Omen series and The Orphanage out here, but the outcome is neither as plausible nor as engrossing as its progenitors.
Director Alvart does succeed in keeping the ambience claustrophobic and forbidding, but that’s about it. Zellweger is just about passable, ditto the rest of this shriekfest.
Conclusion: Worth a skip.