THE POSSESSION

Recently divorced from his wife, Clyde hosts his two young daughters, Hannah and Em, in his new home for the entire weekend. During a visit to a neighborhood market, Em spots an old wooden box with Hebrew inscriptions on the sides and is particularly struck, asking her father to buy it for her. The box is sealed and contains something, so Em, intrigued, forces it open, discovering inside some strange containers, a ring, human teeth, a lock of hair, and a dead moth. From that moment, the girl begins to behave very strangely, showing signs of imbalance and schizophrenia. After routine medical visits, Clyde begins to convince himself that his daughter is actually a victim of demonic possession. The Ghost House Pictures, a production company founded by Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert and dedicated to horror in all its forms, has certainly not shone for the quality of its products so far. If we exclude "30 Days of Night" (the sequel couldn't be watched!) and "Drag Me to Hell", directed by Raimi himself, it is difficult to find particularly memorable products, given that among the saga of "Boogeyman", that of "The Grudge" and a couple of "The Messengers" there is not much to rub one's hands together. And unfortunately, even a promising product like "The Possession" does not improve the fortunes of this trend much, although we are faced with a film that is at least a notch above most of the Ghost House films. The really fascinating thing about "The Possession" is the true story that underlies it. Yes, because this film is also based on real events and specially readapted and spectacularized for a horror film. In 2004, Los Angeles Times journalist Leslie Gornstein discovered the story of a man who was auctioning on eBay what he believed to be an authentic dybbuk box. Dybbuks are malevolent entities of Jewish folklore that can only survive by attaching themselves to humans and settling into their own flesh (the word dybbuk, in fact, means "bond"). The only way to defeat these spirits/demons is to lock them in special containers that isolate their power. In the story told by the Los Angeles Times, the owner of the box said he had lived a series of misfortunes since he had come into possession of that object and before him the same thing had happened to previous owners. The object is traced back to an elderly woman who survived the Holocaust, who arrived in the United States after the war with this box, warning her relatives of the danger that lurked inside and recommending that they never open it. The film thus takes the story of the dybbuk box and inserts it into a typically modern context like that of daughters divided between two divorced parents and combines it with the exorcist horror genre, which has recently come back into great fashion. The good potential of the subject is somewhat reduced by a screenplay that is too mannered (work of Juliet Snowden and Stiles White) that tends to ride all the possible and imaginable clichés of exorcist horror, effectively making "The Possession" a film that has already been seen. The story of a woman persecuted and possessed by a dybbuk had recently been told with some qualitative mediocrity also by "The Unborn" and "The Possession" ends up resembling in large part this film by David S. Goyer, although on its side it has a greater in-depth exploration of the Jewish myth and a series of effective scenes that we can undoubtedly consider successful. The small details that suggest the presence of the demon in Em's everyday life are marked with increasing effectiveness and scenes such as the one in which the girl looks inside the box showing a transformed face, or the spectacular scene of the moth invasion or the unsettling encounter/clash between Em and her mother in the kitchen, all manage to elicit some chills. The final exorcism, on the other hand, leaves quite indifferent, perhaps more for the strangeness of the Jewish ritual than for anything else, although the final climax does not lack some good and chilling insights. In this regard, the hospital location, taken from the Riverview Mental Institution, an abandoned psychiatric institute (and it is rumored haunted!) located in British Columbia, plays in favor, although it is hard to believe that a functioning hospital in the reality of the film is so deserted during the night. At the helm of "The Possession" is the Dane Ole Bornedal, known above all for the thriller "Nightwatch", who gives an excellent directorial performance, very attentive to the atmospheres and with some beautiful shots on the other hand to mark each temporal ellipsis. Of the cast, Jeffrey Dean Morgan ("Watchmen"; "The Resident") and Kyra Sedgwick (the TV series "The Closer") certainly do a good job and the rapper Matisyahu also convinces in the role of the new rabbi exorcist Tzadok. So, there are good things in "The Possession", but the predictable screenplay and with ugly dialogues tends to flatten everything and the rhythm of the film is uneven with a first half hour or forty minutes in which practically nothing happens. In the end, you have the feeling of having watched a film that you have already seen dozens of times, a well-executed assignment that, however, leaves no trace at all.