Film Review: THE POSSESSION OF HANNAH GRACE

Genre: Horror, Thriller
Rating: 2/5
88 minutes
Director: Driederik van Rooijen

Reviewed by Hoshang K Katrak

Films of the horror genre are largely dependent on a dark, sombre background, jumpscares and a background score to match. Hannah Grace has all that in good measure. And of course a little bit of the church with a priest exorcising the evil spirit would do well, reminding one of Omen or Exorcist.
The first 10 minutes of Hannah Grace has a priest trying to exorcise the demons out of Hannah (Kirby Johnson), a girl barely in her twenties. Failed attempts cause her father to smother her to death.
Cut to three months later. Megan (Shay Mitchell), a police officer who’s just come out of drug substance use rehab, has landed a nightshift job as an intake assistant in the Boston Metro Hospital morgue.
The film’s genre ensures that it’s an eerie place and it’s a solo job of fingerprinting and taking stock of the odd body or two being dropped there every night. And when the corpse of a young woman is dropped off by a man who insists on promptly cremating it, the film attempts to perk up. The locker where the body is deposited opens by itself, the injury marks on the body disappear and Megan’s friends and colleagues get gruesomely bumped off. As the man who brought the body says, “The body heals only when others are killed.”
HG is a misplaced effort, though not disjointed. Its potential is wasted through poor writing and uninspired direction. And the couple of scares elicit laughter rather than fright. Even in a film under two hours, a mangled corpse creeping spider-like on walls and a forced body count is not one would expect from a film of this genre.
The statistic of HG being the first Sony Pictures film to be shot on a full-frame mirrorless camera, costing a mere $ 2000, is barely any consolation.