Thursday 22 August 2013

The Possession

"The Possession" (2012, Ole Bornedal, Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert, Lionsgate, Ghost House Pictures, North Box Productions) is a supernatural horror about a little girl who buys and opens a creepy old dybbuk box and is then possessed by what's inside.

A fun little flick with a creepy and atmospheric build up, slightly ruined by showing too much at the end. Throughout the whole film we never truly see what was in the box and we can never properly hear what it's saying to  young Emily (Natasha Calis), which is brilliantly creepy, unfortunately, they seemed to have a special effects budget and were hell-bent on blowing it all in the end, so...

Reminiscent of "Candyman" for the visual effects and "The Exorcist" for the theming, but with Judaism as the focus religion in place of Catholicism. 

The acting is great, especially that of the young girls Emily and her older sister Hannah (Madison Davenport). Also, as much as I kind of hated the ex-wife character, Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick), you don't get much history on the relationship problems outside of Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) working too much away from home and being distant, so maybe Clyde deserved all the hate.

And what's not to love about Jeffrey Dean Morgan? He's a handsome man, plays father to Sam and Dean Winchester in "Supernatural" and leads a happy band of heroic miscreants in "The Losers".

All in all, it's not the scariest thing I've seen recently and it plays too much to the horror-tropes to be anything more than yet another exorcism film, but it's eloquently put together, well-paced and generally a good film.

[Image: Lionsgate]

Hani

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