“The Possession of Hannah Grace” is the latest horror film where a young woman is possessed and then killed during an exorcism. It stars Shay Mitchell, Stana Katic, and Grey Damon. Diederik Van Rooijen is the director responsible for bringing Brian Sieve’s scrip to the screen.
Shay Mitchell plays a traumatized former Boston cop who is starting a job on the midnight shift at the morgue. The character, Megan Reed, is apparently just starting in recovery from addiction and gets on with the morgue in order to help stave off the temptations brought on by too many lonely nights. A very unusual corpse ends up on her gurney where Megan later learns that the young woman died during a failed exorcism three months before.
Stana Katic, formerly of the television series “Castle” plays a nurse on the midnight shift and also is Megan’s sponsor in their recovery group. It was pretty cool to see Katic in one of her first roles away from “Castle.
Films of this genre do suffer from a bit of predictability and this one is no different. It ends up being a chase scene around the typical gloomy corridors in the bowels of the hospital. There were some pretty creepy scenes through.
I thought Mitchell did provide a fairly engaging performance in the lead role. Kirby Johnson played the title role and was the typical and yet unusual girl who finds herself possessed by a malevolent demon for some inexplicable reason. The films starts off with her rather disturbing death after the exorcism goes awry.
The visual effects were fine. Kirby Johnson was made up quite convincingly as the contorted and mutilated corpse which isn’t quite as absent of life as first assumed.
I thought Mitchell presented the audience with an interesting protagonist in the form of Megan Reed. When the strange occurrences really start to manifest, Mitchell’s fear is convincing enough.
I did not find the film to be terrible, but there was not much I expect will really stay with me. It’s just another movie in a long line of possession plots that provides a few moments of started gasps and jumps but not much else to make it stand out.
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