Mark Reviews Movies: THE POSSESSION OF HANNAH GRACE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 30, 2018

The Possession of Hannah Grace is a lot of waiting for something to happen, followed by a final-act burst of considerable silliness. The story is perhaps only notable for being a story about demonic possession that begins with an exorcism and never shows another one.

We've been trained by horror movies to anticipate that such stories will build to that peculiar ritual, so there's a bit of trepidation when the movie opens with a pair of priests praying over a girl, clearly controlled by a demon. We keep waiting for the moment that the scene will cut before it reaches its climax, because, if we're going by expectations, this is just a tease for what's to come. Instead, the screenplay by Brian Sieve plays out the exorcism until its end, and the conclusion is a moment of genuine surprise.

Because it's the only real moment of inspiration in the entirety of the movie, it's almost a shame to have to reveal what happens, but the rest of the plot depends on what happens in this prologue. Those are the breaks, though: If you're going to open a movie with some real promise and proceed to dismiss it with every new turn, that fleeting moment of inventiveness simply becomes another plot point.

Here, we're introduced to Hannah (Kirby Johnson), possessed, of course, and wreaking havoc on the priests and her distraught father (played by Louis Herthum). This demon's trick is to slowly raise a person into the air and cause some serious damage. One priest's head is impaled on a sharp point of a nearby crucifix. The other nearly strangles himself, until Hannah's father intervenes. He places a pillow over his daughter's face until she dies.

It's a perk-up-in-your-seat kind of moment, because the eponymous character and the situation of the title are both, apparently, dead within minutes of the movie's start. The possibilities for where this tale will go have opened, and for a brief moment, we're left without any bearings in knowing what will follow—an exciting rarity in this age of cookie-cutter horror offerings.

Of all the possibilities, though, it was probably inevitable that Sieve would fall back on the most obvious one. Why should filmmakers bother to challenge preconceptions, when it's so much easier to give the audience what they already expect?

The rest of the story, picking up three months later, follows Megan (Shay Mitchell), a former cop who froze at a critical moment, resulting in the shooting death of her partner. She became an addict to alcohol and pills, and now attending meetings for recovery, she's looking for a new job. Her sponsor Lisa (Stana Katic) suggests a night job in the morgue at the hospital where she works as a nurse.

The first thing one will note is the design of the morgue, with its high ceilings, its stone walls, and its elaborate security measures. It looks more like a fortress than a holding place for dead bodies, and director Diederik Van Rooijen spends a considerable amount of time establishing how all of the lights in the space are motion-detecting. It's too much time compared to the few scenes in which those lights serve as an omen of ill fortune.

In case it isn't obvious by now, Hannah's body shows up at the morgue, and so, too, does the girl's still very distraught father, who sneaks into the morgue and, certain that she's still alive and still very possessed, tries to burn his daughter's body. At first, Megan is convinced all of the strange noises and odd visions emanating from around Hannah's body are just hallucinations. Then the bodies eventually but quickly start to pile up around the hospital.

Van Rooijen doesn't give us many jump-scares or, for that matter, scares of any variety. The whole affair is basically waiting around for the inevitable moments when Hannah will rise and cause havoc again, while Megan dallies around with the lights, on the toilet, with the morgue equipment, and with her denial that something strange is happening here. As for the demonically possessed girl, the movie alternates between her being a physical presence, who needs to crawl around and take elevators to reach her soon-to-be victims, and her being some supernatural entity, which can appear at will in any given location to scare and then kill somebody.

It's probably folly to expect consistency from something like The Possession of Hannah Grace, which wastes the potential of a clever setup to take the laziest and most predictable route possible. You can hope that won't be the case at hand, but as that filthy axiom goes, the other hand fills up first.

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