Movie Review: 'The Possession'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- What possessed the possessors of The Possession to boast so prominently that their horror thriller was "based on a true story"?
True? This chronicle of the terrifying supernatural ordeal that a fractured family of four experienced over the course of a month feels about as true as a wobbly ladder.
And yet...and yet.
A Jewish-themed Exorcist, The Possession, despite its surface preposterousness, does get under your skin, at least far enough to produce the requisite shivers.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick play the divorced parents of two daughters. Their split wasn't amicable and either is their shared custody. But they manage.
When their younger daughter, a ten-year-old played by Natasha Calis, purchases a seemingly innocuous antique wooden box at a lawn sale, she becomes obsessed with it.
Just a stage, they figure.
But then she starts exhibiting uncharacteristically bizarre and even menacing and violent behavior that gets the nervous concern of not only her parents and older sister (Madison Davenport) but the school authorities as well.
What a panicky investigation of the Hebrew inscription on the box and appropriate Jewish folklore indicates is that a malevolent force -– a dybbuk, or dislocated ancient spirit of a deceased person who has been denied entrance to the afterlife -- is inside and that the diabolical apparition has taken over the host girl's body and soul.
Producer Sam Raimi, who knows a thing or two about the horror genre as a producer and director (The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Drag Me to Hell) has mounted a film that starts off as if it's to be suffocatingly overwrought, but that then settles in and goes about its respectable business of making us squirm.
The Danish director, Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch), punctuates his atmospheric chiller -- from a screenplay by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White that was inspired by a Los Angeles Times article entitled "Jinx in a Box" -- with abrupt music cues and shock scares that are generic and obligatory, all right, but are effectively creepy anyway.
And he makes resourceful use of imaginative CGI flourishes that enhance the spooky imagery.
Meanwhile, Morgan and Sedgwick lend presence to the fear-for-one's-children's-welfare proceedings without breaking a sweat, and the youngsters are persuasively natural, especially the impressive Calis, who remains the center of attention once she takes possession of the box.
Crucially, the film avoids the always-distasteful spectacle of child-in-jeopardy exploitation by assigning the jeopardy to the adults around the possessed child rather than the child herself.
So we'll inhabit 2½ stars out of 4 for the supernatural horror thriller The Possession, an unnerving variation-on-a-theme exercise in exorcising.
