‘The Possession’ Review

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So, it’s easy to call The Possession the Jewish stepchild of the excellent film The Exorcist. It involves a little girl’s purchase of a strange box with Hebrew inscriptions – a box we find out is holding a dybbuk inside which is an evil spirit that once released, attaches itself to its host. I saw this film for two reasons: (1) I’m a sucker for horror film and (2) Roger Ebert had given the film 3.5 stars. I wanted to see what the fuss what about. Sadly, it’s not about much and is a rather formulaic story of a girl who becomes possessed by the dybbuk when she opens the box and lets it out.

Natasha Calis plays Emily who buys the box at a garage sale and things begin to do downhill from there. What works is Emily’s innocence as well as the straightforward, realistic portrayals of her divorced parents nicely played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick. The film is a direct descendant of The Exorcist – let’s call it Exorcist-lite. The possession occurs on a young girl and her parents are beside themselves, particularly her father, in their attempt to understand what is happening to her. As in The Exorcist, key scenes take place in a hospital where there is one of the most interesting MRI images you’ve ever seen in a film – the dybbuk is seen inside the girl via the MRI.

Through a Hebrew scholar at the school where he coaches basketball, the father finds a group of Hasidic Jews who warn him about the box. One named Tzadok (Matisyahu) decides to help the family and with their assistance, performs an exorcism in the hospital’s basement or morgue (it’s hard to tell). The exorcism is violent and the dybbuk is successfully driven out of the girl but is driven inside her father instead. Finally, the demon is driven out of the father and in a rather creepy scene, it slithers its way back into the box.

The Possession includes some nicely rendered effects sequences, particularly including moths and shots of the dybbuk itself. But these are not enough to make the film recommendable. When the film focuses on the interrelationships between the two daughters and their divorced parents, the film has life and breath; unfortunately, the film gives up on these relationships and goes for the special effects instead in dramatic scenes meant to scare an audience. I saw it with a half-filled theater and believe me, no one was scared; in fact, some were even laughing at certain scenes.

In the last decade, there have been too many exorcism movies to count but none of them has equaled the original, The Exorcist. None but one – and that is a German film called Requiem (2006) centering on a young woman with epilepsy. At some point, she believes she’s possessed by a demon and seeks a priest’s help but he turns her toward a psychologist instead. It is one of the most simple, beautiful films about the subject of potential possession and the psychiatric answer or answers available to the supposedly possessed person. See Requiem instead, without all the special effects and potential scares; you’ll find it far more rewarding than this film. Or just rewatch the original Exorcist film and enjoy.