The Possession of Hannah Grace Review

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The Possession of Hannah Grace does the smart move and doesn’t make itself a carbon copy of all The Exorcist copycats. This is an interesting twist on the demon possession sub genre and is well crafted enough to overcome its repetitiveness.

Synopsis

The possession of Hannah Grace is not like other possession movies. If you are expecting an exorcism in the denouement, you will be surprised that it’s the opening scene, and it results in the death of the titular character. The best way to describe this movie is that it’s like the demon version of Weekend at Bernie’s.

The protagonist of the film, Megan Reed (played by Shay Mitchell) is a recovering alcoholic and pill popper that takes a new job as the intake assistant at a hospital morgue during the GRAVEYARD shift. Hannah Grace’s body is delivered to the morgue on her first night on the job and as the night progresses, stranger and stranger things start happening. By the time that Megan realizes there is something fishy about Hannah, the demon has gained enough power to start killing a lot of people.

Review of The Possession of Hannah Grace

There are a lot of things that are good about The Possession of Hannah Grace. First of all, it completely subverts the expectations of a possession film, by not focusing on the lead up to an exorcism. 

The writing is surprisingly competent given that it was written by a writer from Teen Wolf. I really liked how they handled exposition in the beginning and set up all the rules for a normal night at the morgue.

There were some really effective jump scares especially from the ginger night security guard.

Kirby Johnson who plays Hannah gives a great performance as a contortionist.

 The the biggest downfall of the film is that it gets really repetitive at the end. All the deaths are essentially the same, so I wish they had some more creativity around that, but they were effective in showing the hopelessness of the situation.

Megan’s character has an arc, but it seems a little paint by numbers and doesn’t establish very strong stakes for the story. I guess we are worried that she’ll die? Do we care if she relapses? She’s more there to be a witness than anything.

Overall it was a pretty good film. I feel a little bad that we let it slip by when it was a new release

Score

6/10