The film opens with our protagonist, Emily, who is a benevolent social worker.
She puts her entire life into making sure that children won’t have to grow up in abusive homes.
One day, her co-worker, Wayne, hands her a case of an alleged neglect of a child
named Lilith Sullivan. She checks it out and sees the girl’s photo inside, before heading
home for the day to get ready for a date with Doug, who is also another co-worker of hers.
Doug is charming and kind, and it is clear that the two are smitten with each other.
However, their jobs are very time consuming, so they decide to not
jump right into a relationship for the time being. Later that night, Emily spends some time studying
Case 39, which is none other than Lilith Sullivan’s case, and the case intrigues her.
The next morning, she heads straight to the Sullivans’ residence, where she is coldly greeted
by Lilith’s mother. She asks for an audience with the entire family, and it becomes clear
that something must be going on, since the father downright refuses to even say a word to Emily.
They end up in an awkward stare-down most of the time, and the mother
states that they don't have family problems. When Emily gets back to the office that day,
she tells Wayne that she is convinced Lilith must be abused, because something seems to be really
wrong with the parents. Therefore, she convinces Wayne to let her invite the family to the office.
When the family arrives, for some reason the father starts speaking eloquently.
He tries to convince Emily and Wayne that nothing is wrong with the family.
Regardless of what the father said, Emily is still convinced that something is up.
She finds Lilith afterwards, and finally gets to talk to her alone. After some convincing, Lilith
finally admits what is wrong with her parents.
She also begins admitting that her parents would
like to send her to hell, whatever that means. Hearing this, Emily becomes more concerned.
She takes Lilith to Wayne and asks the little girl to make an official
statement admitting what her parents did to her, but Lilith stays silent this time.
Without any strong evidence of abuse, Wayne tells her to let the case go.
But of course, this doesn’t stop Emily. She goes to see her cop friend Mike, and the cop
friend tells her that he can’t do anything, until she brings him any solid evidence of child abuse.
Determined to keep Lilith safe, Emily finds her after school and hands Lilith her number.
That very night, Emily is relaxing alone in her living room, right when she receives a
call from a distressed-sounding Lilith who is saying that she is scared, because her parents
are about to harm her, and that she is sorry because she can’t keep herself awake any longer.
This prompts Emily to exit her house and head straight for the Sullivans’ residence.
She also calls Mike the cop on the way, and begs him to come to the scene too.
At the Sullivan’s residence, Lilith parents carry the sleeping Lilly to the kitchen,
and proceed to place her inside the oven.
She struggles against her evil parents to no avail,
and they successfully put her back inside the oven this time.
At the same time Emily and Mike arrive at the scene,
and forcefully break their way in as they hear Lilith’s screams.
Emily finally finds Lilith and lets her go, while Mike follows right after her, but then..
While Mike fights against the father, the mother takes a knife and moves to attack Emily.
Luckily, Mike manages to stop the mother.
Due to this incident, the court throws Lilith’s
parents inside a mental facility to be psychologically evaluated,
while Lilith will be put in a state home until they find her a foster family.
However, right as Emily takes her to the state home, Lilith says that she doesn’t
wanna stay there, and wants to live with Emily because Emily is a caring person.
Emily with a heavy heart initially says no, because this would cause a conflict of interest
in her line of work, but finally gives in because she feels emotionally attached to the child.
She then convinces the board of directors to let Lilith stay with her and succeeds.
Afterwards, Emily returns to see Lilith to tell the kid that there is good news for them.
On the next scene, Emily makes a visit to Lilith’s old home to pick up a few things.
There she discovers scratch marks on the floor,
and multiple padlocks inside the parents’ bedroom door. This signifies that for some
reason, Lilith’s parents would barricade themselves in their room every night.
Emily then leaves for work, and watches as Lilith attend group therapy for kids with troubled homes.
Here, we see a kid named Diego share about how he gets bullied at school
because his parents have marital problems. On the next day, Emily gets summoned by Wayne,
who grimly informs her that Diego murdered his parents last night.
Emily then rushes to the crime scene, and witnesses the blood spatters on the bed.
Mike the cop is there too; he tells her something strange about how Diego was climbing the walls,
and it took 3 men to subdue him. Emily can't believe what she heard,
thinking that there's no way a 10-year-old boy could do this.
This incident shakes Emily deeply, but luckily Doug is there to comfort her.
As Emily returns home later, she discovers that Lilith went through her family pictures. This
leads Emily to share about her past: her mother died when she was young due to a car accident.
On the next day, Emily has lunch with Mike the cop. Here Mike informs her that right before Diego
murdered his parents, the boy received a call that suspiciously came from Emily’s house. This baffles
Emily, because she swears that she never called Diego’s house that night. The two then proceed to
Emily's house to interrogate Lilith, but the girl insists that she never called Diego that night.
Before Mike leaves that night, he tells Emily that he is convinced Lilith was lying.
Curious, on the next day Emily decides to go to see Diego,
and asks him if Lilith called him that night, but he only starts hyperventilating.
Diego then gets taken to a hospital, and Emily tries asking him again. This time, Diego finally
speaks. In Spanish, he tells Emily that it was a man’s voice that called him that night.
Emily spends the rest of her day thinking about the information that she just learned,
and how a man's voice could have come from her house. Lilith is at the office with her,
until Doug takes her with him to her to assess her progress as a formerly abused child.
Alone with Doug, he questions her about the questionnaire that she just filled in. Apparently,
Lilith answered no to all of the questions in the paper regarding fear of something.
Doug then tells her that it can’t be true, and tries asking her what her greatest fear is.
The girl then promises to tell him her greatest fear only if he tells her his.
As it turns out, Doug is afraid of hornets. It's at this point that Lilith begins acting sketchy,
by saying that she is only afraid of herself because she has bad thoughts about certain people,
including Doug. She then proceeds to warns him by saying that he should
be afraid of what’s coming for him. Doug seems shaken after the session,
and goes to tell Emily that he never feels threatened when talking to kids. During supper
with Lilith that night, we can see that Emily is starting to grow suspicious of the child.
That same night, Doug’s landline rings, and he goes to pick it up, right when he hears a
weird sound from the call.
Afterwards, he begins to hear buzzing noises in his ear,
which leads him to use a Q-tip to fish out whatever is inside. That’s when he sees this:
He finds a hornet. Terrified, he flushes it down the toilet,
but more and more start popping out of his ear.
Soon, a swarm of hornets land on his back, which forces him to take his shirt off and throw
it inside the shower.
But it’s far from over; hornets start coming out of his parts of body,
overwhelming him and somehow suddenly killing him.
The next scene shows Emily and Lilith attending Doug's funeral,
during which Emily’s suspicion towards the child only grows stronger.
She goes to meet Mike and tries convincing him that something is off with Lilith,
and that the child has got to be responsible for what happened to Diego and Doug.
But Mike of course doesn’t believe her. She then spends the rest of her day watching
interviews the mental hospital had with Lilith’s parents, and learns that Lilith’s parents believe
that over the years, Lilith has been killing people through some sort of mental manipulation.
Lilith's mother says that her and her husband used to have brothers but when Lilith was born,
they began to die one by one and she blames the girl. The mother also says that Lilith could not
get rid of them until Lilith found someone new, and this makes Emily feel very scared. Emily then
goes to visit Lilith’s parents at the psychiatric hospital, wherein she sees the mother strapped to
the bed. But then..
As it turns out, the jump scare was merely Emily’s hallucination.
She then gets an audience with Lilith’s dad, who is convinced that Lilith is a devil incarnate of
some sort, and that she feeds on kind people like Emily. He tells Emily about Lilith and that she
is not his daughter but an old destructive soul like a demon. He also warns her that Lilith is going
to hurt her using her worst fear against her. Terrified, Emily tries to get Lilith off of her
custody, but she isn’t able to for the time being. She then goes to visit Lilith as she attends her
group therapy session, and crudely pulls Lilith away when she is seen whispering to another child.
Emily who is worried that Lilith might harm someone else tells her that she
cannot attend group therapy anymore. This infuriates Lilith, and then this happens:
But as it turns out, this is merely another hallucination.
Emily is now fully convinced that Lilith is a demon. She tries talking to Mike about it again,
but he still doesn’t believe her. That night, she installs several locks on her bedroom door,
but as it turns out Lilith is standing right outside like a creep.
On the next day, Emily is at work when she gets a phone call from a client.
Unlike her usual, kind and patient-self, Emily begins yelling and cursing at the caller.
Wayne takes notice of this and tells her to go home. He then gets a phone call,
and tells Emily it’s for her. As Emily takes the call, she hears Lilith’s voice,
and then… Emily is suddenly all alone at the office,
and everyone has gone home. She rushes home, and ignores Lilith on her way into her bedroom.
Emily arms herself with a screwdriver, and locks herself in. At some point during the night,
Lilith begins to beg for Emily to let her in, saying that she's scared.
Not long after, the banging stops, but Emily begins hearing noises coming from her closet…
Emily runs for her life while the disfigured figure goes after her.
She finds a bus driver, who lets her inside the bus.
The bus driver is confused as he sees no one coming after Emily.
Emily then steps out of the bus and enters her car, where surprisingly,
Lilith awaits. She begins telling Emily that Emily has to do everything she says or else.
The woman who is terrified has to relent for now. On the next day, Emily gets informed that they
have found a foster family for Lilith. Unwilling to let Lilith hurt anyone else, Emily visits
Lilith’s father again to consult on what to do. The father tells her that she has to get Lilith
to fall asleep, because it is the only point during which Lilith is vulnerable.
Not only that, Emily must not be afraid, because Lilith takes advantage of people’s fears.
When Emily gets home after, she finds Lilith creepily watching a video of her parents
getting interviewed in the mental facility. Lilith then proceeds to say that her parents
stopped doing what she wanted them to do, and insinuates that they must now pay the price.
Back at the mental facility, Lilith’s mother starts envisioning herself being inside a giant
oven, and starts burning to death.
Meanwhile, her father suddenly snaps and kills another patient,
before accidentally killing himself with a fork to the eye.
After hearing about Lilith’s parents’ death, Emily goes to visit Mike once again, and this time, the
cop friend believes her. He then goes to show her a recording of the phone call Lilith made to Doug,
right before he died. In it, we can hear that Lilith’s voice gradually shifts to a man’s voice.
Emily then tells Mike that she has no choice but to kill Lilith. Mike agrees to help her.
However that night, as they part ways to get ready, Mike gets ambushed by
a dog that suddenly appears inside his car. Mike shoots it with a shotgun and
accidentally kills himself in the process. Back home, Emily gets a call informing her
that Mike is dead. Furious, she goes up to Lilith, and knocks over the TV.
Emily begins yelling at her to get out of the house, but Lilith yells back in a man’s voice:
Now even more terrified, Emily locks herself inside her bedroom,
but Lilith begins to literally obliterate the door.
Emily hides under the bed while Lilith calmly walks inside.
Her voice keeps shifting between that of a little girl and a man’s. She then crawls under the bed,
and tells Emily that she only wants Emily to love her. With no other choice, Emily plays along.
Before tucking Lilith in for the night, Emily makes her some chamomile tea mixed with a ton
of sleeping pills. She then makes sure Lilith is asleep, before tying knots on Lilith’s
bedroom door, and pouring gasoline all over the house. Emily eventually sets the house on fire,
and she feels relieved as she watches it burn from the outside.
However, she realizes that her plan fails when she sees Lilith somehow made it out alive.
As per the police’s instructions, the two pile into Emily’s car and soon begin to tail police
cars that are taking them to a temporary shelter. At this point, Emily is completely sick of Lilith;
She suddenly swerves the car away from the police and begins speeding.
Lilith uses her powers to give Emily a vision of her past, in which she was a little girl inside
a car with her mother driving recklessly moments before getting into a car crash.
Emily manages to overcome her fear and snaps out of the vision, which terrifies Lilith.
She swerves the car away from the road and plunges it off a pier, sinking them both.
As water begins to fill inside the car, Emily tries to drown Lilith to death,
and we can see Lilith transform into some sort of a creature.
Emily then breaks her way out of the car and tries to swim to the surface, but then…
Lilith tries to pull her down,
but Emily manages to escape her grip and makes it back to the surface.
The movie ends with a breathless Emily staring at the water in relief.