My Best Films

Introducing this year’s Mirrors: it played in the same Monday afternoon slot, it features a big Hollywood star and it isn’t very good.

Zellweger is a social worker who takes on a seemingly sickly-cute 10-year-old whose parents try to shove her in the cooker, only to discover Lillith (clue’s in the name…) is a little monster.

A couple of early scenes of child abuse (including the aforementioned oven shot) are promising although it’s patently obvious early on that butter certainly would melt in her mouth.

The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper co-stars as Zellweger’s love interest and a scene of hornets literally coming out of his ears is itchily effective, but the movie quickly becomes generic and silly, plodding to an anticlimax.

It’s hard to avoid comparisons with recently released Orphan, a movie that’s similarly derivative and daft, but Case 39 doesn’t even reach that movie’s mediocre bar. Oh dear.

Case 39 is directed by Christian Alvart, whose grim, gritty and painful thriller Antibodies showed at FrightFest a few years back – this is an enormously disappointing follow up - where Antibodies is more similar in style, and indeed quality, to the excellent Millennium, Case 39 is barely woth opening.