Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson) is already possessed when
The Possession of Hannah Grace begins, and dies during a botched exorcism before the opening credits roll. The movie isn’t about her, anyway: It’s about Megan Reed (Shay Mitchell), a young ex-cop haunted by her past, who takes a job working the graveyard shift in a hospital morgue. The heavily mutilated body of Hannah is delivered one night—but wouldn’t you know it, even though she’s dead, she’s still possessed. Exceptionally generic supernatural spookiness ensues—flickering lights, strange visions, Megan (a recovering alcoholic) thinking she’s hallucinating, etc.—directed with perfunctory competence by Diederik Van Rooijen from a witless screenplay by Brien Sieve (
Scream: The TV Series). To its credit, the film goes easy on the jump-scares and occasionally makes good use of silence. But while the concept of a demon-possessed corpse 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 movie exactly like this one comes out.
By
Eric D. Snider