When the Bough Breaks (1993 film)

Following a gruesome discovery, State Profiler Audrey Macleah is called in to help investigate. She discovers a connection between the serial killings and young Jordan Thomas, who has been institutionalized since he was 4. As Audrey grows closer to the troubled youth, so to does the truth. Just what ties Jordan to the serial killer and can Audrey solve the mystery before another young girl meets the same fate as the previous victims?

The storyline itself is somewhat confused and illogical. The local police have been baffled by finding, year after year, severed hands, evidently very cleanly cut from the bodies of teenage girls - coupled with annual reports of missing teenage girls. FBI-trained profiler Audrey Macleah is presented with the case - and also with the troubling fact that a silent teenage boy who has long been kept in the county psychiatric hospital painted a hand on the wall of his cell every year at about the date that each girl had gone missing. It is speculated that this boy, who has no visitors, has some telepathic ability related to these crimes. Macleah makes an enormous effort to communicate with this boy (who, although institutionalized and mute since the age of four, somehow learned how to write) and learns that although his name is Jordan he has a secret alter-ego named Jenny. Further investigation reveals that the disappearances of the girls, and Jordan's painting of a hand, occur each year on Jordan's birthday. The effort to look up the hospital records of Jordan's birth reveals even more. The denoument owes something to Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960) and even more to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991). Despite the identification of the villain, enormous chunks of the mystery remain unexplained.

• Ally Walker: Audrey Macleah
• Martin Sheen: Captain Swaggert
• Ron Perlman: Dr. Douglas Eben
• Tara Subkoff: Jordan Thomas / Jennifer Lynn Eben
• Robert Knepper: Lt. Jimmy Creedmore
• Scott Lawrence: Sergeant Footman
• John P. Connolly: Sergeant Belvin

Grand Prix Vidéo from the Cognac Festival du Film Policier 1995 for Michael Cohn.

• When the Bough Breaks on IMDb
• When the Bough Breaks at Rotten Tomatoes