According to the tagline of Bless the Child "Mankind’s last hope just turned six." But would Jesus return after 2,000 years in the form of a six-year-old autistic girl? When the film begins, Jenna O’Connor (played by Angela Bettis), a drug addict, abandons her baby to her unmarried sister Maggie O’Connor (played by Kim Basinger), a nurse who makes a modest living. Six years later, Jenna returns to reclaim the child, named Cody (played by Holliston Coleman), accompanied by her husband, Eric Stark (played by Rufus Sewell), who appears to head a cult that superficially resembles L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. Stark (aka the Devil) wants to convert the Child of God to Satanism, so he is determined to recapture the child and does so. When Maggie reports Cody as kidnapped to the police, they appropriately recommend that she get a lawyer to fight a child custody battle. Meanwhile, Stark has been behind the abduction and slaughter of five children born on the same day as Cody, as if to reproduce Herod’s proclamation to kill every child born in the year when a special star portends the birth of a Messiah. Devoutly religious FBI Special Agent John Travis (played by Jimmy Smits), who is hunting down the unknown serial killer, believes that Cody will also be killed but fails to share his suspicion with Maggie. When Cheri (played by Christina Ricci), a defector from Stark’s cult, informs Maggie of Stark’s home address, the police are again ignored. Thus, two manhunts occur. Maggie soon recaptures Cody from a dentist’s chair and drives her from New York City toward Vermont via Albany to reach a safe haven. But the Satanists follow Maggie, rekidnap the child, and head for an unguarded estate outside Albany. Maggie then telephones Special Agent Travis to report the kidnapping, and he flies to Albany with the intention of saving the day, but not before heavenly lights (the Holy Spirit?) come to protect Cody. Based on the novel "The Devil in the Sixth Circle" by Cathy Cash Spellman, the film presumably seeks to inspire Christians to keep the faith and to realize that evil does exist and must be confronted, but we will have to await a sequel to learn how an autistic child can possibly save the human race from the Devil. The plot of Bless the Child has many clichés and many holes, but the main problem is that for most of the film naïve Maggie, despite all her devotion to Cody and God, mistrusts both lawyers and well-intentioned law enforcement officers and thus clumsily gets into a lot of unnecessary trouble. MH

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Bless the Child by Cathy Cash Spellman

Praised for creating fiction that "will keep you turning pages night after night" (The Dallas Morning News), bestselling author Cathy Cash Spellman imagines a terrifying realm of devilish menace in a novel that will touch your heart -- and chill you to the bone.