We Heart Horror - Day 19: The Possession (2012)

  This wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be, despite the cast.  It's really hard to do a good possession film.  Still, it was nice to see something non-Catholic-centered.

Ten-year-old Emily (Natasha Calis) finds a carved wooden box at a yard sale.  Her dad, Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is confused but thinks it's harmless.  He's much too busy trying to further his career to pay attention anyway, and her mom (Kyra Sedgwick) is distracted by her new boyfriend (Grant Show).  So the possession is pretty far along before either parent knows what's happening.  Clyde takes the box to a professor at the college he works at and is referred to a community of Hasidic Jews.  A man named Tzadok (Matisyahu) agrees to perform the exorcism.

I think this movie went wrong making most of the conflict about the dad.  Morgan spends 90% of the runtime completely baffled and hurt by why he can't get his adolescent and teenage daughters to be exactly the same as when they were small.  He is a man clinging to the past, whether it is sports fame or the remnants of his marriage, and he doesn't want anyone to be able to move on.  It's an annoying frame and has no purpose in the narrative.  In fact, in any other movie, he would be the antagonist for Sedgwick to overcome and move on to a soundtrack of Motown hits.  She's not given very much to do here so maybe she should start looking at that rom-com remake.

The other major complaint I have with the movie is the sound.  Dialogue is muted for background noise, like it was recorded underwater, only to fade back in and be super loud.  Also, I've never seen a Jewish exorcism but I don't know that I expected quite so much yelling.  I would have liked to maybe see more about the rituals and how they differ from the Catholic versions, but that's something I can look up on my own.

Bottom line:  this is yet another "clueless dad clueless because he refuses to listen to women in his life yet somehow still the hero of the story" film not enlivened by swapping Catholic rituals for Judaic.  Pass.