With the summer movie season drawing to a close, fewer and fewer titles are released each week, and I’m running out of things to watch. The only movie opening in my city this week was the Sam Raimi produced The Possession.
Just returning from the film, I’m still pretty torn on exactly how I felt about it. When The Possession works, it really works, providing as much scary, disturbing imagery as you can handle, and in a very believable setting. When it doesn’t work however, it really doesn’t work, and pulls you right out of the world it’s so carefully trying to build.
The Possession opens well enough. We see an old woman scared out of her mind, the object of her fear a mysterious box on her mantle, which appears to be whispering to her. She escapes to the kitchen, and returns with a hammer, on a mission to break the box. She lifts the hammer above her head, but before she can strike, she freezes and falls to the ground. She writhes and seizes in disturbing, unnatural ways (think Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist) while the music and sound effects grow and grow in intensity before the woman simply stops moving.
This scene was an excellent and effective start to the film. We get an idea of the power of this malevolent being who either really dislikes old women, or simply wants something else entirely. We’re also introduced to one of the highlights of the film: its excellent sound direction. The score and sound design really add to the experience here, and help to make already intense situations overwhelmingly so.
Enter our main characters in the film, the Brenek family (or what used to be the Brenek family). The couple is just divorced. The family is confused and broken, with the kids moving in between homes as the mother and father try to rebuild their lives.
I find that it’s with the family story that The Possession really shines. After a fast opening, the horror aspects of the movie tend to move rather slowly. Much of the time, the film feels like an intense family drama more than a horror flick, and though it isn’t at all what I signed up for, for some reason I’m okay with that. The family dialogue is well written and interesting, and serves well to get you caring about these characters before shattering your hopes for them.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen, Grey’s Anatomy) gives a fantastic performance as Clyde Brenek. He’s a father with nothing left but his kids and his job, and he gives both the best that he can. He handles the many emotions of the film extremely well, going from happiness to worry, sheer terror to heartbreak, and everything in between. He’s great, and extremely believable throughout, even when the movie starts pushing to extremes.
Natasha Calis also gives a quality performance as Em Brenek, Clyde’s daughter. She starts the film as a freaking adorable little girl before becoming the subject of the box’s desires.
Em becomes smitten with the box at a garage sale run by the old woman’s son (one could say it spoke to her, pun intended). We get one more glimpse of the old woman as the Breneks leave, appearing to be on her deathbed, screaming for her to leave the box alone.
I mentioned before that the actual horror elements of the film are rather slow. We get a bit of box whispering here and there as Em seems to become less and less connected with herself and her family, at one point stating “I don’t feel like myself”. Em’s strange behavior is typically attributed to the recent tough times the family has been going through, and not much else is thought about it.
It seems like it’s the actually in the scenes that involve the box that I find The Possession works the least. We see it open itself and whisper to Em a few times as she sleeps, but nothing much comes of it (obviously it’s actually the being inside that is speaking to her, but it looks like a freaking talking box and it seems silly). She brings the box to school and ends up beating up a kid who tries to touch it. The scene tries to be extremely intense but I found myself laughing at the absurdity of it instead.
The film runs 92 minutes, and while Em is disturbed for much of it, the actual possession doesn’t occur until over 60 minutes in. When a movie is titled The Possession, you really expect the actual possession bit to take up a larger chunk of it. Instead, when the actual event does happen, we’re so far into the film that it has to quickly jump to a resolution just so we can see the whole story. The film either needed to be longer, or simply get to the point quicker to avoid the abruptness of the ending.
When the demon finally enters Em, it really doesn’t seem like it wants to do much until they try and get it out of her. Really, it just seems to turn her into a bitch more than anything. If that’s the case, most of the girls I went to high school with had this box in their lockers.
It doesn’t help much when we get a generic scene of Jeffrey Clyde visiting a possession expert, who essentially tells him everything about the box, including what’s in it, where it came from, when it was made, and what he needs to do to fix things. This was definitely the weakest scene for me. It’s only purpose was to reveal everything to us that would have been better left as a mystery. Mystery’s are good! We don’t need to know everything about the being to know it’s not good. It really destroyed any sense of mystery that the film had built. Thanks for explaining the entire film, pal. Now, if only Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character from Inception had played the expert…
There’s one last bright spot in the film though. The exorcism scene works really well. Set in a very atmospheric hospital basement (for privacy’s sake, and since Em was already in the hospital anyways). The scene is creepy as hell largely due to the atmosphere (dim lighting, dirty and dank looking, hard surfaces making sound echo). This becomes especially true when Em breaks free, and Clyde chases her into the hospital morgue. This scene was extremely tense, suspenseful, and uncomfortable for seemingly everyone in the cinema: strobe lights and laughing creepy children make for a scary time. This isn’t anything that we haven’t seen in a lot of horror film’s before but The Possession manages to do these scenes very, very well.
Now for some SPOILERS.
Eventually, Em is caught, and the demon is returned to it’s prison. Upon the resolve of Em’s possession, everything seems back to normal much too quickly. This event was (cheesily enough), just what the Brenek family needed to bring it back together. Clyde looks happy again, and the very morning after they all could have lost their lives, they began joking about it.
The film closes however, with a car accident involving the vehicle containing the box with the demon. We hear the whispering again just before the credits roll. Looks like it didn’t get what it wanted, and is already trying to break free, already ready to try once more.
Again, when The Possession works, it works well. Tense scenes are very tense, atmospheric, and creepy. The family has great onscreen chemistry and their conversations definitely made you really care and want things to work out for them. As much as I liked this stuff, I came to The Possession to see a possession, and instead mostly watched a family drama where one of the characters is a creepy whispering box.
It was a good effort. The film looked great, and had a lot of strong cinematography on top of the great sound direction I mentioned before.
The Possession wasn’t overly memorable, but being that its only horror competition right now is the abysmal in every way imaginable “The Apparition”, I’m sure its box office numbers will be just fine.
3/5