Review of The Possession (2012) by Philip P — 22 Jan 2013

When this horror flick debuted in late August I was rather surprised I was hearing so many positive things about the film. All of that good energy the film had going for it was lost in the first ten minutes or so as the film quickly descended into exactly the type of generic horror flick you'd expect something called "The Possession" to be.

One can tell the film has a certain visual style it tries to accomplish throughout yet it is unable to rise above any of the genre's cliches with its extremely typical story. The young girl of a seemingly modern family becomes possessed through a small box having something to do with the Jewish religion.

That is the twist the film hopes will pull you from the standard way these kinds of films play out. Still, simply changing the mythology of what causes the young prey to be possessed from Christian demons to Jewish doesn't constitute a strong enough argument for the film to be any better than what anyone who's seen a "scary" movie in the last decade has come to expect.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan adds a fair amount of class to anything he decides to do and he does what he can here with a character so very set in his type. The divorced dad trying to move on who has issues making it to what matters for his two daughters.

We like him though, we see that he is trying. The same cannot be said for Kyra Sedgwick who hardly does her job to walk the line between the ex-wife and progressive mother that we want to see Morgan's character re-unite with.

Natasha Calis does some good work helping us to wince at the screen more than laugh at the absurdity of it. Still, it is hard to see the film as anything more than typical despite it trying so hard to rise above the negativity associated with that word.