Sunday, December 2, 2018

The Possession Of Hannah Grace



Runtime: 85 minutes

Directed by: Diederik Van Rooijen

Starring: Shay Mitchell, Grey Damon, Kirby Johnson, Nick Thune, Louis Herthum

From: Screen Gems

What a movie to see when you just want to kill some time...

Are there many hospital buildings designed in the Brutalist architecture style?

As I had free time on Saturday night, I probably won't use my AMC A-List app too often the rest of the year and this movie was the only one which fit my schedule and that of the location I saw Hannah Grace at... oh, and the plot did sound similar to The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a film which came out a few years ago. I did see Jane Doe and that is certainly better than this movie, although Possession wasn't as bad to me as many people believe it is.

The two films only share the general idea of weird events happening with a corpse at a morgue. Here, the movie starts out with an exorcism that goes wrong... I might as well share that info as the movie's title tells you that a girl is possessed, and it's the opening scene. Eventually, the body makes it way to the morgue that is connected to a surprisingly not busy Boston hospital. I mean, the only person working there at the job is Shay Mitchell, and she just started that line of employment. She used to be a cop, but a tragedy happened and she did not handle it well, leading to such things as depression, anxiety, and addiction... those things are definitely key in this film.

This is pretty preposterous, is not all that scary and is only barely a rated R. Yet this was not horrid to me. Considering this same studio (Screen Gems) released Slender Man this past summer and that apparently was a travesty, this had to be better than the doomed flick about the creepypasta character. The angle they pursued concerning demonic possession was interesting and unfortunately, is pretty relevant these days. As Shay Mitchell spent a lot of time being the only one on screen, thankfully then her performance was good. There were a few subtle moments and while not scary, at least there were some creepy moments. 

Of course this is yet another example of modern big studio horror not being comparable to what the independent studios are doing, but at least this was not horrid... OK, the editing in one scene was pretty bad as it suddenly rushed to a key scene out of nowhere and that scene itself also had some jarring moments... but overall this wasn't a tragedy like The Bye Bye Man.

However, horror fans should see The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

One last thing: it was pretty laughable how this used the trope of “a hospital where no one is around”... I know people who are nurses... hospitals are never not full of people. The same has to go for a morgue, especially in a metropolis like Boston. I don't know what building they used to portray the hospital/morgue but the architecture was Brutalist, which is wacky enough as it's a distinctive style, although you never see it used for such a business. Then there is something which will only be relevant to a few random people here, and that is how the main setting looked a lot like the main library building located in downtown Orlando, Florida. It was an unintentional source of comedy.

No comments:

Post a Comment