The Possession of Hannah Grace – 2018 – 86 Mins
What's it about? Megan Reed is an ex-police officer who, after leaving the force due to her guilt for the death of her partner and turning to alcoholism and drug dependency, gets a job on the graveyard shift at her local hospital. Soon into the job, the mangled body of a young woman named Hannah Grace, who allegedly died following a failed exorcism, is brought into the morgue. From here, strange things begin to transpire, and it's up to Megan to finally bring evil to rest.
In Review
When I saw the trailer for Hannah Grace earlier this year, I was drawn in by the interesting premise it gave - what happens when an exorcism goes wrong, and how could this scenario affect an individual left vulnerable by their own emotional demons? That's certainly the concept the trailer seems to indicate at least, and so I was very interested to see Hannah Grace for myself, thinking perhaps a horror sleeper hit had past me by the year prior. Unfortunately, I can tell you now that the film actually touches very little on the ideas I felt were evident in the trailer, and I can also tell you that what I got instead was nothing at all worth my time or yours. So really you can stop reading the review now given I've already given the verdict, but why not stick around as I dissect Hannah Grace and outline exactly what went wrong here.
We'll start with what I believed the film would be about from the trailer, and how these ideas were actually presented in the film. Following the opening scene, in which Hannah has her ill-fated exorcism, we receive our introduction to protagonist Megan Reed, who is quickly built up to be a character with emotional issues and unwarranted feelings of guilt via some fairly adequate story telling. It's nothing special, but it is effective enough in spotlighting where Megan currently is at this time in her life, most notably that she is currently back on the rise from a dark chapter that she seems very much ready to leave behind. Specifically, we learn she froze up during an altercation with a suspect, who shot and killed Megan's partner, and she burdens the responsibility for his death. This caused Megan to turn to drinking and a dependency for prescription drugs, which in turn lead to the break down of her relationship with fellow officer and boyfriend Andrew Kurtz, and ended with her leaving the force.
It also does a well enough job of justifying an otherwise off-putting career path of working the graveyard shift at a morgue, as Megan was recommended the job by a friend who is also a recovering alcoholic, and who found the graveyard shifts helped her in avoiding the sauce, as her shifts would coincide with the hours of which clubs and bars are their most tempting. If you're feeling this sounds a commendable enough building of a character, then congratulations, you have been duped just as much as I was when watching all of this transpire on screen. Sure it wasn't done in the most elegant or creative manner, but nevertheless it had my attention, and with the possibility of all of this having a very good payoff when the spooks begin to start, I was very invested.
Sadly however, much as it does in the movie, everything goes downhill once Hannah's body is brought into the morgue.
At first everything is very textbook - we have less music, less lighting, and the isolated vibe the film wishes for begins to settle in. Once the atmosphere is nailed down, we can then expect a few frights for Megan; standard stuff at first such as lights turning off and on, mysterious footsteps, and objects seeming to move by themselves. But soon enough we cross over into the paranormal (read: shite) frights, such as Megan pulling back Hannah's body bag only to be attacked by a swarm of flies which, upon a second look, were never there...
These are the moments where you begin to realise that perhaps the filmmakers were not equipped creatively to tackle the story Hannah Grace seems to want to tell - and I emphasise seems because I wonder if they ever really had this clever idea to begin with, and it was just the tireless work of the marketing team that put the idea in my head that this film ever had any chance of merit.
It certainly does seem though that Megan is at first passing off the disturbances as her own issues getting to her in this incredibly lonesome and distressing environment, however things are turned from coincidental to incredibly on the nose so fast that you'd be forgiven for forgetting that Megan's own mental well-being could ever be attributed to what she is witnessing. "Frights" begin to be thrown around with such minimal disregard that all building of characters, suspense, and expectations are swiftly demolished - with one scene in particular in which a ghoulish arm grabs a rubber-band ball from under a toilet stall Megan is occupying (more on this later) being the moment I began to realise why I had perhaps heard nothing of this movie.
This leads me to my next point of critique - Hannah. When Hannah (or the demon residing within Hannah if you want to be pedantic) begins to take the spotlight, we are able to fully see her for what she is - a poorly executed horror cliche antagonist who offers very little to the film other than being "the big spooky", who also for some bizarre reason harnesses similar powers to the of Imhotep from the Mummy franchise. However unlike Imhotep who is cool as fuck and sucks folk dry in a most brutal and grotesque manner, Hannah "heals" herself via the most vanilla of killings possible. There's no mummified corpses left behind, there's no cool visualisation of Hannah's wounds healing, there's not even a fucking explanation as to how killing equals healing - it just is what it is, and what it is is absolute horse shit.
What's more, because of this bogus revelation of demonic healing powers, the threat of Megan's mental vulnerabilities are now a complete write off - what does it matter that she's in a dark place if it no longer matters to the story? By this point both we the audience and Megan know that this corpse is very much alive and a threat, and if the demon likes the vessel enough to go to the efforts to repair it rather than transfer to another such as, I don't know, the only other fucking person in the entire morgue who also happens to be emotionally damaged so an easy target to infest, then exactly how is Megan anymore vulnerable than any of the other characters? What, the threat is that she's gonna freeze up when she see's Hannah and not shoot her like she didn't shoot that other guy? Fuck off.
Does she freeze up? No, she does not. She throws Hannah into an incinerator and everything is okay, despite the fact that Megan now has further emotional trauma to deal with, along with the death of her best friend who got her the job, as well as a couple of other hospital personnel which will no doubt result in a police investigation into the matter and for Megan to lose her fucking job and probably start drinking again. Fuck yeah, go Megan.
I think this is what pissed me off so much about the film. It really makes no attempt to make itself anything other than another throwaway piece of horror cinema that is seemingly targeted at loud and obnoxious teenagers who go to the cinema and sit on their fucking phones and fall into hysterics whenever something pops up on screen and goes boo, as though the very sensation of having their attention ripped away from their phones is something worth ticket prices.
As such, almost every piece of this film's fat is simply cut away from far superior titles, as this was clearly the most cost effective and time saving tactic in getting the script finished. The opening exorcism borrows very heavily from the tropes established by The Exorcist, though with some camera work that would feel right at home in a black metal band's music video, and some brief gore that looks as well rendered in CGI as it would have done when it was presented to the animators on a napkin scribbled in red crayon. We also get the classic "the scary thing gets closer and closer when the lights go out but then it isn't there oh wait yes it is" scene when Megan's friend Lisa crosses paths with Hannah, and of course the token "ooh it's all over oh no wait it isn't" jumpscare as Megan attempts to cremate Hannah's body.
I also cannot overlook the previously mentioned elastic band ball toilet scene in which Hannah's arm reaches for it from under the door to spook Megan, which is possibly one of the dumbest fucking scene in the film as prior to the arm's reveal, we get a shot of Megan looking under the door and seeing nothing in the room before the climatic "fright", which goes to show how the director clearly has an understanding of how a scary scene should pay off but absolutely no idea on how it should be set up and executed.
All in all, this is a film you should most definitely avoid. I was hugely disappointed after having my interest and expectations built by the highly deceiving trailer, and what I was instead presented with was a horror film that seems to have only been produced as a means of extracting money from the pockets of the worse kind of cinema goers. It was boring, predictable, lazy, and more often than not it featured scares, plot points, and dialogue that can only be described as laughable. Not invite your friends round for a couple of beers to watch a bad film kinda laughs either, these are the kind've laughs you only bust out when you're in a club toilet and someone starts talking shit to you about their life when all you want to do is end the conversation and get back to the dance-floor because you can hear them playing Fatman Scoop and you love Fatman Scoop.
In fact that is how I can best sell The Possession of Hannah Grace - if you want the sensation of a drunk person trying to establish a connection with you in the toilets of your local dive bar but you don't want to pay entry fees or be up late because it's a work night, then this is absolutely the film for you.
Watch if You Liked
Slenderman | Exorcist II | Sherlock Gnolmes
Sequels?
I fucking hope not.
Easy to find?
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