The Possession of Hannah Grace

The Possession of Hannah Grace is an R rated horror that’s anything but. If you’ve seen any trailer for this movie, you’ve seen just about every “scary” part in this movie. With an odd plot that gives minimal backstory, and characters that never make the film feel real, it was a complete snooze fest.

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The movie starts with the last of what you later learn to be many exorcisms for Hannah Grace, played by Kirby Johnson. She is accompanied by her father and two priests. As one of the priests is preforming the exorcism, Hannah begins to levitate him, arms out like on a cross, and then kills me. The second priest steps up to continue the exorcism, and Hannah begins to kill him as well, when her father then “kills” her to save the second priests life. This entire scene is odd, with no explanation of how the characters got in the situation and with very little explanation on this at any point in the movie. The appearance of the possessed girl is far from believable, based on the appearances from other movies. The exorcism is also uneventful, not seeming to do much harm to the demon whatsoever.

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The other main character of the movie, an ex-cop who’s background we also know very little about, is taking on the job working the graveyard shift at the morgue in the local hospital. She’s taking the position by recommendation of her AA leader, Lisa (Stana Katic), to help her stay out of trouble. Her first shift is going smoothly until Hannah’s dad tries to break into the morgue, claiming to work there. Shortly after, a man named Randy (Nick Thune), drops of the body of Hannah Grace. This is when things start to get odd.

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The movie proceeds to play out into a repetitive series of events that seem pointless and too predictable. It’s this drag that leaves the movie lacking in anything even remotely scary. With just a few jump scares spread out through the film, I was constantly asking myself why I was still watching. I believe the trailers themselves were scarier than the actual film and misleading. With that, I give this movie a 4 out of 10 stars.

I do appreciate how the movie can have a main character that only has one line. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie before this that did this. It was kind of a cool idea. I also appreciate the minimal number of characters that play any sort of major role in the movie. I feel like movies today all must have tons of characters, and this one strays away from that theory.

The Possession of Hannah Grace has got to be the most repetitive and uneventful movie I think I have ever seen.

Hannah Grace makes her liveliness apparent to the audience by constantly moving when Megan is observing her, and regularly leaving her little morgue box (I'm not sure what those are called) to roam the halls of the morgue while Megan is distracted with other things. Megan seems to be completely oblivious to all of this activity until about halfway through the movie. At that point she only seems mildly suspicious. She's more worried about figuring out who Hannah actually is, since she managed to convince herself that she had the wrong body.

While Megan wastes her time trying to prove she has the wrong body, Hannah begins to take people out, one at a time. Megan still somehow manages to miss all of this until about another fourth of the movie goes by. She has also began to make everybody else think she is crazy. After Hannah makes herself known to Megan by throwing a ball into her stall while she's in the bathroom, Megan checks the cameras to see if she can figure out who was in the bathroom. Hannah shows up on the footage vaguely when it glitches out a bit, and Megan decides to show her friend (Lisa) to make sure she's not seeing things. Lisa tries to convince her she's just seeing things and tries to talk Megan into going home early, but to no avail. The movie proceeds with basically every other main character getting murdered by Hannah without Megan knowing.

The lack of jump scares and the dull deaths leaves you bored and wishing you could get the last hour and a half of your life back.