The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018) Review!!

Synopsis – When a cop who is just out of rehab takes the graveyard shift in a city hospital morgue, she faces a series of bizarre, violent events caused by an evil entity in one of the corpses.

My Take – Since the release of the 1973 film, The Exorcist, the horror sub-genre has been jammed pack with all kinds of demonic possession films over the past four decades. While some films like The Conjuring and Insidious managed to stand tall among the rest despite their familiarity, their divergent and divisive execution resulted in their immense success. But for some reason, this film from director Diederik Van Rooijen, was said to be the next great exorcism film, and horror fans were definitely excited from what I could gather on social media.

Maybe it was because considering how run of the mill the sub-genre has become, any demon-possession story that unchains itself from the bedroom seemed like worth looking into, and from the trailers seemed to have the elements of a good, no-frills horror exercise: a novel angle, a creepy single location, and a convincing lead in the form of Shay Mitchell (Pretty Little Liars). Turns out they all were wrong, as this film is far from what you would call the next great exorcism film.

Personally, I didn’t hate it, probably because I have seen worse, in fact, I found the film instead a little creepy and more of a throwback to ’80s horror. But becomes really disappointing when it quickly starts offering what it thinks are frills: extra characters, extra kills, and extra noise. The would-be scares feel like they’ve been lifted from the dozens of films that supplied the clichés of the opening sequence, and have been dropped here without much regard for either physical or psychological atmosphere. It just ends up being completely formulaic with mild scares, and instead felt like a cheap knock off the superior film, The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) from director André Øvredal.

The story follows Megan Reed (Shay Mitchell), a former cop and recovering addict who hopes to strengthen her grip on sobriety with a new graveyard shift job at a Boston hospital’s morgue. As she begins to get used to a new routine and the cadavers at the hospital, an ambulance brings in a mangled corpse, which was apparently rescued from a crazed killer trying to burn her body. While her equipment fizzles out during the fingerprint marking process, she finds out that the dead girl is none other than Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson), who died in an exorcism gone wrong.

But what Megan doesn’t know that the demon still inhabits Hannah’s body, and it’s not long before strange things start happening, like a stranger (Louis Herthum) forcefully tries to enter the morgue, and everyone around her, which includes ex-boyfriend cop Andrew (Grey Damon), her sponsor Lisa (Stana Katic), a nurse working at the hospital, the hospital’s security guards (Max McNamara, Jacob Ming-Trent) and a friendly ambulance driver Randy (Nick Thune), are in danger. Naturally, Megan is a recovering alcoholic and pill addict, so she doesn’t know whether the things she’s seeing are really happening or she’s just losing her mind.

Like I said before this is not a terrible film, it’s just not scary nor interesting. A prologue offers the kind of exorcism content we’re familiar with: heavy Catholic iconography, chanting priests, a nubile female body writhing and lashed to a bed. Despite the raw opening scene, the film is quickly down the tubes with no explanation as to why Grace is possessed as director Van Rooijen instead turns toward elements of horror clichés to make up for a flat story line. The film’s screenplay picks out some successful moments from Exorcism related films but there’s neither mood nor momentum going, for effect here.

The setting certainly had possibilities that a better director would have explored with more effect. Dutch director Diederik Van Rooijen just trundles along without much imagination or heft. And the audience is left totally unaffected! It seemed like the filmmakers behind the film couldn’t decide whether it wants to be a supernatural horror with fear routed in possession, or a psychological one where we don’t know if what we’re seeing is real or in the head of a mentally unstable protagonist. Which is why the most interesting thing about the film, written by Brian Sieve, is that it abandons all that gothic familiarity for a night at the morgue.

The morgue setting of the film, with its motion-sensor lights that keep flickering off and on, is great, and it’s mostly used well (though not as well as in another morgue-set horror film, The Autopsy of Jane Doe). The creepy factor is high, and whenever something is just about to happen, director Diederik Van Rooijen manages to have control. Here, he also engineers some small-scale frights when he sends shadowy figures brushing through the background of the frame, beyond Megan’s field of vision.

But when they actually happen, the camera spasms, and the editing lurches, as if attempting to cover up the fact that we’ve seen all this scary stuff before, from jump scares to things suddenly whisking by. This are all done to uplift a poorly designed story that’s supposed to nag at Megan with doubt over what she sees in front of her, as she continues to be haunted by an inability to fire on a suspect in the field during her cop days. At one point, someone wonders to Megan, “Why hasn’t she killed you?” It’s an apt question. She’s a mentally unstable young woman, struggling with addiction and anxiety and trauma — ripe for possession. But it seems in Megan, Hannah and whatever is inside Hannah (it’s never clear) has met its match, and that’s the place where we should dive further. It’s a bit of a shame the film never draws that out with any clarity.

Most of the supporting characters thump, too, broadcasting their traits so loudly and insistently that they seem expressly designed as malicious demon fodder, whether or not they actually meet that fate. Another bizarre aspect of the film is Reed’s relationship with the other characters, most particularly, her ex-boyfriend and cop, Andrew Kurtz. Though their initial encounter in the beginning of the film is cold and uncomfortable, as the story progresses, writers have seemingly abandoned this script in favor of one geared towards care and love. This leaves viewers questioning their relationship and whether or not writers had any creative ideas beyond the scope of an ABC Family/Freeform drama.

The narrative has neither atmosphere nor logic going for it. Just when you wonder why the father was left unscathed you have to deal with the fact that he is the one who goes after Hannah Rose’s decapitated body while hurting and injuring several others in the process. However, the film condescendingly plays a lot of these events as if the audience doesn’t already know they’re happening. When Megan tells her friend about the breathing corpse, it is explained with the simple biological fact that dead bodies can exhale under certain circumstances. But this bluff doesn’t work when the very first scene we saw informed us that there is a possession going on, so we know this is what’s causing it, somewhat reducing its horrific impact. This only serves to show that the film is not really as smart as it thinks, and further demonstrates its inability to pick a tone.

Here, director Van Rooijen could have at least let Hannah try to harm this newly hired after-hours morgue assistant rather than completely ignore her to pad the run time. Also the “rules” that govern the possessed corpse of Hannah Grace are arbitrarily enforced — she’s bound by physical laws sometimes, at other times apparently capable of teleporting or moving through walls — and while the concept of a demon-filled cadaver skittering around a dark hospital basement is interesting, the film doesn’t do anything with it that you haven’t seen before or that you won’t see again in a few weeks, when the next film exactly like this one comes out.

Performance wise, Shay Mitchell does a solid job as Megan, while Kirby Johnson embraces a wonderfully physically embodied performance as the corpse who won’t stay still. However, the rest of the cast, which includes, Stana Katic, Grey Damon, Nick Thune, Jacob Ming-Trent, Max McNamara and Louis Herthum are wasted. On the whole, ‘The Possession of Hannah Grace’ is formulaic and cliché filled horror film that marks yet another tedious entry into an already well-worn genre.