1. giniscanlan

   10

   We've watched a few stinkers lately but this one is a great movie. The plot had enough twists and turns to keep you guessing and I think we all know a kid with the potential...… Expand

   • Helpful? 2 of 2 users said Yes.
2. AgentJohnson

   8

   This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. I found Case 39 to be a very interesting and compelling movie. Pardon me if I don't spend half of my review hyper-focusing on the pea eating scene and aggressively trying to fabricate a series of sexual metaphors from it. It was simply a marker, a fastidiousness that might, normally, seem perfectly natural for a child but was conveyed, through the use of careful camera work, as yet another manifestation of control by the child, of the tempo of even an ordinary dinner.
   The most remarkable scene was when the child/demon, after battering down the blocked door and slamming a screwdriver hilt-deep into the floor, slowly crawled to within a few feet of where Emily was hiding and entreated in a silky voice charged with menace: "You don't want me to crawl in there and pull you out, do you?"
   I find the negative reviews of this movie to be short on detail and vague. Fails on all levels? We've seen it all before? I disagree. In a genre stuffed with prior efforts, there will be similar elements. What I expect from a movie such as this is to keep me along for the ride and make it interesting and compelling. Case 39 certainly manages it and doesn't set up the kind of glaring contradictions and indecipherable twists of, say, After Life.… Expand

   • Helpful? 0 of 0 users said Yes.
3. bottafff

   7

   This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. I thought the movie was good and pretty suspenseful. I think the writer and director did a good job of letting the audience think the little girls' parents where evil but then suddenly it hits you that she is one who is really evil/possessed. The only negative thing I have to say is that when nobody believes that the girl is evil and everyone thinks she is the crazy one is quite cliche.… Expand

   • Helpful? 0 of 0 users said Yes.
4. Shiira

   3

   The masturbation scene from William Freidkin's "The Exorcist" will always be shocking. In a sense, the saying, "Now I've seen it all," should have been retired after 1973 when twelve-year-old Regan MacNeil(Linda Blair) jammed a crucifix in her vagina, while burning moviegoers' ears with a scatological mix of sex and religion that not even Prince would ever dare approach. The projectile vomiting, however, so often parodied, and more importantly, smiled upon, since the bodily function plays a big part in the modern comedy aesthetic, as a result, seems to have lost a lot of its initial shock value because moviegoers don't see the devil's bile anymore, they see pea soup. Lilith Sullivan(Jodele Ferland) eats peas, but that's as far as it goes; she masticates and digests; she holds her vegetables down. In "Case 39", it's harder to see the devil inside. As Lilith methodically cuts each pea with a knife and fork, Emily Jenkins(Renee Zelwegger), her foster mother, thinks nothing of it, chalking up the girl's idiosyncratic eating habits as a symptom of her abused past. The devil inside Lilith also knows how to keep its sexual appetite in check; the devil keeps things discreet. Adorning those walls of the girl's old house, the domicile where Lilith was almost cooked alive, trapped inside the oven, put there by her parents, as if the whole family were characters out of a modern-day Brothers Grimm fairytale, are crucifixes, that, as Sheena Easton would put it, never "spend[s] a night in [her] sugar walls," but nevertheless, carries a certain sexual latency, being that the devil would distort the Christian relic's holy significance the first chance he'd get. Naturally, the carefully sliced peas has nothing to do with persnicketiness; it's a warning sign, unbeknownst to Emily, that her charge, the devil incarnate, perceives Doug(Bradley Cooper), a child psychiatrist, as a rival for the dim-witted woman's attention(but to be fair, all horror movie heroines are programmed this way), and an affront to the foster parent's boyfriend's prowess as a satisfactory lover, in which the peas denote small balls, and its smashing, denotes further that small balls is no match for big balls. Not only does Doug die, but the girl's father, Edward Sullivan(Callum Keith Rennie), too, whom the girl's mother, Margaret(Kerry O'Malley) chose over Lilith/the devil after she rejects her/his overture to, perhaps, engender devil spawn. The audience gets to see this scenario play out for themselves. When Emily, finally, at long last, realizes the mess she's in, the devil turns on the charm, utilizing its proxy to play the lolita, by tweaking the girl's feminine voice to flirtatious and persuasive heights, as a means to coax her guardian from under the bed. Since this is the devil we're talking about, Lilith probably wants to do more than talk.… Expand

   • Helpful? 2 of 3 users said Yes.

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