Filmmaker doesn't think outside the box

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Oy, again with the demons: Rabbi Tzadok (Matisyahu, left) attempts an exorcism on Em (Natasha Calis, centre) while her parents Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick) look on. (DIYAH PERA/MCT)

Scary movies can have a clever way of taking everyday fears and anxieties and amplifying them with a paranormal push. Take away the spectres from The Shining and you still have the core horror of domestic violence. Remove the werewolf trappings of Ginger Snaps and you're left with the story of a girl's difficult transition into womanhood.

The Possession director Ole Bornedol understands that dynamic. In the foreground of this late-summer chiller, a young tween girl named Emily is possessed by a demon she herself unlocks from a so-called "dybbuk box" innocently acquired at a yard sale.

In the background, Emily and her sister were destined to be shaken eventually, owing to the divorce of their basketball-coach dad Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and mom Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick).

Optional title: Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Demon.

Given weekend custody, Clyde probably buys the box to distract his youngest daughter Emily (Natasha Calis) from the ongoing tensions of the recent divorce. But the gesture ends up backfiring big time. We already know from the film's opening scene that the box contains the power to bounce an old lady around a room like a lavender-scented medicine ball. Subsequently, Emily starts sitting alone in her room, violently acting out (savagely sticking a dinner fork in dad's hand at one point), and slowly losing herself to the whispering entity in the oblong box.

When Clyde investigates the history of the container, he comes to the conclusion Emily has fallen victim to a demonic entity of ancient Jewish origin.

In The Exorcist, the acknowledged champ of all demonic-possession movies, the story of the troubled priest Father Karras ran parallel to the story of the possessed little girl, but this movie's writers, Juliet Snowdon and Stiles White, alas, do not possess the same narrative instinct. A helpful rabbi (Hasidic rapper Matisyahu) only appears in the third act, when the desperate Clyde turns to the Hasidic community for help in exorcising the demon. This has the effect of presenting Orthodox Jewry as an entity as mystical and weird as the demon itself, even if they do rise to the occasion in trying to defeat the entity.

At least the movie offers a few bits of chilling novelty in the possession sub-genre, including a creepy suggestion of what a demon would look like as seen through a high tech medical scanner. Elsewhere, the demon seems to move around a human body by pushing a victim's eyeballs around every which way.

That aside, The Possession's dybbuk box is mostly filled with genre clichés. For the most part, the only rolling eyes you'll encounter are your own.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Movie review

The Possession

Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Natasha Calis

Kildonan Place, Polo Park, Towne

14A

91 minutes

2 stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 31, 2012 D5