Nowadays, there are about eight million movies about exorcisms, and The
Possession has the distinct privilege of not being the worst
one from 2012. That honor goes to The Devil Inside, which is just awful. The Possession, on the other hand, isn't too bad, even if it
doesn't deliver too many scares. The characters propel it to be a little
bit more than the sum of its parts, so for a Monday night Redbox rental,
I was entertained.
Okay, this thing should have been subtitled The
Jewish Exorcist, because that's what it is. It's about a little
girl, Emily (Natasha Calis), who finds a mysterious box at a yard sale,
and once she opens it, she's slowly taken over by a malevolent demon.
It takes a lot of cues from The Exorcist, but somehow the filmmakers forgot to add the
atmosphere and intensity of the 1973 classic. There are some effective
scenes, but overall, I couldn't help but feel like the director, Ole
Bornedal, was playing it safe to appeal to as many people as possible.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Clyde, the father of
the possessed girl, and he's one of the best things about the movie.
I really, really wish he was in more things. Besides this, I've only
seen him as The Comedian in Watchmen. As far as performances go, he's two-for-two
in my book. Here, besides being Emily's father, he's an apparently great
basketball coach trying to get back to the Division I level. His marriage
ended in divorce roughly a year before the movie takes place, and he
gets his two daughters every weekend. Things get royally screwed up
when he buys the demon box for Emily, potentially allowing an evil spirit
to literally grow inside her. He does a fantastic job playing a concerned
father who's sort of on the outside looking in. His ex-wife is dating
someone, and several times Clyde is forced to view his daughters and
ex interacting with him as a family unit. That situation sucks, no matter
how amicable the split was, and Morgan plays it to perfection.
I'll take a moment to talk about the demon box,
or as it's officially titled, the dibbuk box. Outside of the movie,
the dibbuk box is a wine cabinet purported to be haunted by a restless,
malicious demon. It's been passed through a few owners, each claiming
an evil entity inside the box as the cause of misfortune and supernatural
happenings. There's a 13-minute documentary on the blu-ray that briefly
chronicles the box's travels and different owners. It's a bit silly
if you ask me, but as the basis for a horror movie, I love it.
So, once Emily opens the dibbuk box, the demon
latches onto her innocence and begins transforming her into one creepy
little kid. In one of my favorite scenes, she's brushing her teeth when
she starts dry-heaving. Freaked out, she grabs a tiny flashlight and
shines it into her mouth. While peering down her throat, she sees fingers
crawling up and out. That's a great concept; not only is the demon possessing
her spirit, but it's also physically taking over the body of the child.
Unfortunately, that premise isn't realized as fully as it could have
been, but it still makes for some great scenes here and there.
Here's an honest question for the filmmakers:
Why did you cast Matisyahu as the Jewish exorciser? I mean, he wasn't
bad at all, but...Matisyahu? That's not really fair, because all I can
think about when he's on screen is that he's a Jewish reggae rapper.
I mean, c'mon. When his character is introduced, he's even singing along
to some song while listening to headphones. What a weird choice.
Matisyahu aside, the ending is a little suspect.
In The Exorcist, getting rid of the demon took the lives of more
than one person. And even then, it didn't really work. Here, it takes
a reggae musican and a lot of yelling. Couple that with some annoying
CG (but not the worst, by far), and I could have done with a different
outcome.
Even so, The Possession is short and sweet, clocking in at about an hour-and-a-half. I'll give it a Good, so if you find yourself staring at a Redbox kiosk, you could do a lot worse.
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