The Possession of Hannah Grace (Review)
The Possession of Hannah Grace Is… Well, It’s a Movie…
The Possession of Hannah Grace is easily one of the most underwhelming movies I’ve seen all year and just might be the worst horror film I’ve seen in theaters. The film is a loose mashup of The Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Exorcism of Emily Rose but proves to be nowhere near as good as either of them. The Possession of Hannah Grace is a disappointment on almost every possible level, which is really saying something considering I’m usually a fan of trashy horror films. Then again, this film can hardly be called a “horror” film.
Right from the get-go, nothing really seems to make sense about The Possession of Hannah Grace. The movie opens with an exorcism which doesn’t exactly go as intended but fails to send any shivers downs the audience’s spine as the forces of good do battle with the demonic entity trapped within young Hannah (Kirby Johnson). Maybe I’m justed jaded from watching years of possession movies, but nothing about the opening scene really set the stakes all that high for the rest of the film. Of course, there’s plenty of blood and death over the remainder of The Possession of Hannah Grace, but it all feels pointless.
While so many other possession movies dangle the importance of the immortal soul and the age-old battle of good vs evil in order to get the audiences invested in the story, The Possession of Hannah Grace feels sterile which undermines the urgency of a demon wandering around in a morgue. That being said, I think that Shay Mitchell actually does a pretty damn good job with the weak ass script she’s given. Her character is a recovering addict who also happens to be a former cop coping with PTSD, which sounds like a perfect character for a demon to torment in a possession movie. Alas, writer Brian Sieve doesn’t dig into the rich potential for the demon to torment Mitchell’s character with the sins of her past and tempt her to turn to destructive coping mechanisms. Instead, it simply scuddles about in the dark killing other people who wander in and out of the film leaving Mitchell to just be. Even now, I have no idea why the demon didn’t just gank Mitchell during any one of the countless chances it had.
Director Brian Sieve succumbs to shameless jumpscares in an attempt to jar the audience but runs into a very distinct problem early on when the film telegraphs every potential scare in the first fifteen minutes. The morgue that Mitchell finds herself working in is an inspiration of motion activated technology. Everything from the lights to the doors to the hand dryers seems to be activated at the wave of a hand. The timmer on them though only lasts a few seconds, so the number of lights flicking on and off through The Possession of Hannah Grace can only be described as an epileptics worst nightmare. To make matters worse, Sieve struggles to make this blatant plot device live up to its obvious potential. So much opportunity to play with depth of field and unnerving movement in the background is simply wasted. Instead, The Possession of Hannah Grace is a phoned-in mess of a film that succeeds only in wasting every possible tool left at its disposal by the premise.
It’s not that I had high expectations for The Possession of Hannah Grace. However, with 2018 offering up movies like Hereditary and the new Halloween, I was hoping that the trend of surprisingly good horror movies would continue through the end of the year. That was apparently too much to ask for and instead, it would seem as though The Possession of Hannah Grace only hit theaters in order to shamelessly take advantage of the recent revival of the genre. I hate to say it, but even hie hard fans of horror will find little enjoyment from this catastrophe of a flick.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that The Possession of Hannah Grace is worth the price of admission. In fact, I would struggle to justify it being worth the nearly hour and a half of your life that it would take in order to watch it. I love a bad horror movie as much as the rest of us, and I’ve sat through some pretty terrible ones over the course of this year, but The Possession of Hannah Grace isn’t just bad, it’s totally forgettable. It’s hard to say that I even hate this film because I honestly feel nothing towards it. It’s nothing but a missed opportunity of a movie and one that I’m going to struggle to remember in a week or two.
