Review of The Possession

'The Possession' is a 2012 supernatural horror film directed by Ole Bornedal and co-produced by Sam Raimi. The story is based on the allegedly haunted Dybbuk box. Bornedal cited films like 'The Exorcist' as an inspiration, praising their subtlety. The films stars Natasha Calis, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kyra Sedgwick and Madison Davenport.

I'm going to start by saying that this isn't the best horror I've seen. I'm useless when it comes to watching horrors int he cinema, I can watch them fine when they're on the TV, but as soon as I'm in the cinema, I'm jumping at every shadow. This film constantly builds up with tension, but then most of the time, nothing comes of it. At first the effect where we see some development, then it drastically changes to another scene works really well, but after seeing it over and over again it starts to get old.

Hats off to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, he carries the first hour of the film, he's a good actor, and in this film he is provided with some decent, sometimes witty, dialogue which keeps us interested in the character. The rest of the cast is pretty average, Natasha Calis who plays the young girl who gets possessed has a lot of good moments, but there are some parts where you can't help but think, wow, that was terrible. Then the rest of the cast we hardly see, there's no character development outside of the two main characters played by Morgan and Calis. The last half an hour or so of this movie is actually quite good, it starts to get really interesting. We finally start seeing what we've been waiting for for nearly an hour. If I based this review on just the last section of the film, it would get a really high score, but unfortunately I review to review the film as a whole. If they sorted out the pacing of the film, they could have made it better, it's just far too slow. I understand that it is apparently based on a true story so they have to stay as true to that as possible, but it is also a movie and that means that changes can be made to make it work better on screen. One thing that is consistant throughout is the special effects. All the way through the film they look really good and very creepy.

One critic brought something to my attention, why do we never see any evidence? Like maybe during the end credits why don't we see pictures or real footage? There's a specific scene with a CT Scan (this isn't a spoiler because it is in the trailer) where we see the demon inside of the little girl. We see it on the monitor. Surely if this was a true story, there would be records of this, footage from the monitor, pictures, something! It destroys any sense of belief the film tries to create.

So all in all it is a very average film. It starts off really slowly and we rely on one very good actor to keep us interested.  It prepares us for scares that never happen (leaving people like me embarrassed because they look terrified during the build up), but ends on a high with a very entertaining final twenty minutes. I am going to give 'The Possession' a 6.5/10. If you enjoy horrors, give it a shot, you might like it. It has some pretty cool visuals.