The Possession of hannah Grace

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 86 minutes

Director diederik Van rooijen Cast shay Mitchell, Kirby Johnson, stana Katic, Grey damon

This horror potboiler has a decent set-up. A former cop (Shay Mitchell) with emotional issues – but who doesn’t have the slightest belief in ghosts – starts a night-shift job in a Boston hospital morgue. After a mutilated female cadaver is delivered, weird things start happening, from mechanical glitches to freaky shadows on video camera footage.

The film might have worked as either an old-school, hard-gore nasty, or as a slow-burn mood piece (like the Paul Whitehouse segment in the recent Ghost Stories). There are suggestions of the latter approach in the film’s first half, which is amusingly fun in a generic way, with Mitchell mostly roaming alone in the morgue (though she occasionally gets lectured by some sympathetic support characters who worry she’s going round the bend). It’s a shame we’ve already seen a tacky prologue cloned from The Exorcist, which leaves us in no doubt where we’re headed.

The last section sinks under woeful non-shocks. The kill scenes are tediously protracted, while the killer looks insufficiently special, and quickly gets as dull as the murders. Mitchell’s heroine is presented as “strong” in a 2010s sort of way, but she’s nowhere near dimensional enough for Possession to break out of the morgue. Andrew Osmond