Film Review: The Possession of Hannah Grace

"You Know What They Say. If An Exorcism Isn't Completed, Evil Will Find A New Vessel..."

With the horror genre in general throughout 2018 managing to have one its' most successful years in recent history, with the past twelve months offering up a wide range of interesting, superbly entertaining and, particularly in the case of Hereditary, unrelentingly nightmarish new examples of the well-trodden format, it seems both an oddity and a shame to leave the year on such a false note with The Possession of Hannah Grace, an ideas-based horror flick which fails to hit the heavy heights of its' similarly genred pals and fall instead more into the here-we-go-again cattle-prod cinema audiences more than ever are getting more and more accustomed to. Directed by Dutch filmmaker, Diederik Van Rooijen, and based on a script from Brian Sieve, whose previous credits include the television adaptation of Scream and um, the awkward one-two of Boogeyman 2 and 3, The Possession of Hannah Grace, originally entitled Cadaver, follows Shay Mitchell (Pretty Little Liars) as Megan Reed, a grieving ex-cop and recovering alcoholic who takes the thankless role of a night shift morgue worker who swiftly comes across the battered corpse of young Hannah Grace, a seemingly innocent murder victim found hacked and burnt to death on the streets of Boston with a mysterious past regarding her involvement in a devilish exorcism attempt gone horribly wrong.  

Opening with the titular exorcism attempt, Van Rooijen's movie immediately lays down the movie's wildly chaotic cinematic cards, with the overblown, nonsensical and rather quite silly introduction resulting in one particular laugh out loud moment of unintentional absurdity which begins the failed attempt of the film to hold down a central feeling of dramatic pull which every single effective horror piece fundamentally needs to get spot on. With low budget violence, creaky digital effects and an over reliance on Ringu inspired creepy dead girl gurns, the movie's eighty minute runtime after the initial opening set piece circles in a Groundhog Day esque roundabout as we see our leading lady attempt to get to the bottom of mysterious doings within the morgue, including not-so-secure security doors and the miraculous recovery of wounds on the body of the recently obtained, Hannah Grace. Whilst there is undoubtedly an interesting and spooky idea at the heart of the movie regarding isolation of our leading heroine within a surgically clean open-aired basement with dodgy light installation, the movie unfortunately falls into the same traps many small release American horrors do by resorting to predictable jump scares and particularly dodgy character deaths to one dimensional side characters with as much substance and personality as a freshly made cadaver, but with a committed central performance from Mitchell and rather swift runtime, Rooijen's big time debut is undoubtedly weak and iffy, but not as awful as it could have been. 

Overall Score: 4/10