THE POSSESSION OF HANNAH GRACE: An Ultimately Unrewarding Echo Of “The Autopsy of Jane Doe”

In 2016, André Øvredal’s first directorial feature since 2010’s Trollhunter seemed to hit all the right marks. The Autopsy of Jane Doe followed the unfortunate night of a father and son coroner duo down in their own homegrown morgue, as they attempt to uncover the identity of a mysterious body found at the scene of a bizarre and bloody homicide. As the night unfolds, they not only begin to decipher the meaning of a Jane Doe who seems more alive than dead, but become susceptible to this “corpse’s” supernatural presence – its apparent ability to play tricks on the father and son (played by Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch, respectively), making it seem like she’s flitting to and fro, influencing their surroundings when, in reality, she’s never left the examination table.

It’s a tense, atmospheric little bottle episode of a film; claustrophobic nightmare fuel, while remaining understated and elegant in execution, as the father and son come closer to understanding but further from sanity. In the end, the body’s immobile powers prove too formidable for the pair, and they succumb in an overwhelmingly grisly fashion. Simply another couple of Jane Doe’s most likely many victims.

Thus, it’s hard to ignore the similarities between this film and Swedish director Diederik Van Rooijen’s recently released The Possession of Hannah Grace, an occasionally creepy possession saga, the majority of which takes place in a single night, that somehow ends up making eighty minutes feel like an entire afternoon. The Stuck-In-A-Morgue-All-Night-With-A-Magic-Corpse subgenre gets a new lease on life, but it affords the consideration that, perhaps, it should have just remained buried.

Just Another Night in the Morgue

Megan Reed (Shay Mitchell, of Pretty Little Liars fame), an ex-cop and recovering addict, has decided to make quite the jump in occupations – from police office to morgue… receptionist? Caretaker? It’s a little unclear, especially since she doesn’t seem to have any medical training and one would think that would be part of the job requirements (but what do I know, I went to school for film).

Megan is still traumatized by an incident she endured while on-duty a while back, where she froze up during a stand-off with an armed man who took the opportunity to shoot her partner, killing him dead. This incident has haunted Megan and thus lead her down the road of drug and alcohol abuse, and from there lead her Addicts Anonymous sponsor to recommend she take on graveyard shifts at a morgue. The idea is that if she’s working at night, she’ll be less tempted to do things she’ll regret. It also establishes Megan as an unreliable protagonist, but that idea is scrapped pretty quickly.

So, this, along with the fractured relationship between her and her ex-boyfriend, Andrew (Grey Damon), is all we get from Megan Reed. She’s a gal who’s been through the ringer, and is about to go through it again. She’s defined by hardship and strife, but you’d be hard-pressed to say you really knew anything about her, and that’s what makes it so hard to care about her well-being as the twisted events of the evening unfold.

You see, prior to the Morgue Night Massacre, the film opens up with your average exorcism. The father, the son, and the holy spirit teaming up to take on one of the devil’s rejects, who has made a home in the body of a young girl named Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson). Her dad (Louis Herthum), utterly stricken with grief, watches on as his little girl murders a man of the cloth and is ravaged by the malevolent force that has taken over. Ultimately, the father knows what’s right. He puts a pillow over her face, and holds it there until she ceases to exist.

Except, surprise! She’s not dead, at least, not exactly. Three months later, her body is found in an alley, where a man is seen stabbing at it but escapes before he can be captured. Hannah Grace is then delivered straight to an unsuspecting Megan on her night shift at the Boston Metro Hospital (a disguised Boston City Hall with CGI signs plastered on the front, for some reason).

Before this, Megan received an unwelcome visit from a hooded man screaming at her to let him inside, and in an uncharacteristically smart move for a horror movie character, she didn’t. But when the medic arrives with a delivery of one possessed corpse, Megan takes her in and and unknowingly allows the hooded man in too.

Megan attempts to get shots of the body’s fingerprints. Funnily enough, she can’t. Then, the computer stops working. Then, some medical tools fall on the floor. The body won’t stay put in its cold locker. Then, shit starts going down. In the meantime, she’s navigating around a creepy security guard (Max McNamara) who’s probably a big proponent of the existence of the “friend zone,” an attack from the hooded man screaming about how she has to “burn the body,” a lot of flickering lights, her sponsor, Lisa (Stana Katic), acting skeptical of Megan’s claims that there’s something fishy going on, and her ex-boyfriend accusing her of stealing and abusing his pill prescription. Then, of course, is the fact that people around her keep dying, and that “dead body” seems to look a little more alive every time she pops it back out of the freezer (which is, actually, a frustrating amount of times). Phew!

Creepy Visuals & Unsettling Atmosphere

Despite the fact that the film falls mostly flat, boy oh boy is that Hannah Grace hard to look at. The actress who plays her is absolutely perfect – very pretty, but with the right makeup, lighting, and heightening of specific features, she makes for a pretty great bone-crackling, crawling-on-all-fours servant of Lucifer. She has a haunting gaze made all that much more creepy by her single piercingly blue eye, the mark of the demon possessing her. And when she scrabbles across the hallway floors, crunching and sputtering all the way, it’s almost delightful just to listen to – like it’s ASMR.

The setting of the morgue is also quite claustrophobic, though vast in size but suffocating under the dim lights and feeling of entrapment on the part of Megan. There’s also this sense that the morgue basement is like a maze, with it’s seemingly endless corridors and hallways that hinder Megan at every turn. The morgue itself thus acts like another antagonist in tandem with Hannah Grace, helping her along her road to recovery. Even the security cameras attempt to blur out images of Hannah making her many false escapes.

Too Dragging, a Little Dull, a Lot Derivative

The film is roughly only eighty minutes, but the pacing lends itself to feeling so much longer. There is no real sense of dread cultivated apart from the numerous jump scares, none of which glean more than a twitch or a shift in the seat, and the repetitiveness of Megan going back and forth between opening up Hannah Grace’s body in the locker, then putting it back in, is almost funny in its sheer monotony. Coinciding with an uninteresting sequence of events, are characters that aren’t allowed any depth or personality so that the audience might care about what happens to them – aside for one, whose death is then made all that much more impactful.

Acting-wise, everyone is mostly serviceable. Shay Mitchell doesn’t deliver a performance that’s any far cry from her role as Emily on Pretty Little Liars, and the rest of the cast is neither bad nor particularly exceptional either. The friend-zone guy is allowed to be at least slightly charismatic but, for the most part, the supporting characters border somewhere between constantly irritated and fatigued. Still, as they are dealing with a bloodthirsty corpse at, like, probably three in the morning, these emotions could be considered not entirely unfathomable.

The most disappointing part of this film, however, is that for an R-rated horror, there’s really not that much gore. At all. And upon reflection, the R rating probably stems from the multiple utterings of “f*ck” and nothing to do with the blood and guts. If your horror movie is going to plodding in its plot and characters, at least give the audience something gross to look at to stimulate their minds and linger on after leaving the theater. Not to mention, there’s this bizarre and a bit offensive implication that Hannah’s own depression and mental illness were entirely to blame for her becoming possessed.

Of course, are the ever-present similarities between this and The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a film that tackled the concept of an immobile corpse wreaking havoc from upon an examination table in a much more tasteful and terrifying manner. But Hannah Grace doesn’t stay immobile; eventually, she leaps up from her cold holding cell, and the blatant goofiness of it all, while considering comparisons between the two very differently handled films, makes the ensuing scenes feel that much more schlocky rather than scary. Subtlety is thrown out the window in place of a duel between the living and the dead, which could be turned entertaining if it weren’t for the fact that the film is not self-aware in the least.

The Possession of Hannah Grace: Conclusion

The best part of The Possession of Hannah Grace is that it doesn’t seem to leave any room for a sequel – which is truly less of a jab against the film and more a praise for the ability of the filmmakers to actually end a story, something that seems to elude many others as of late. Things are all sorted out with a neat little bow, and the credits roll. No visage of a demon popping out at the last second, no shadow monster creeping behind Megan unbeknownst to her; no cheeky cliffhanger to let the audience in on that fact that there’s a Possession of Hannah Grace extended universe in the works. The film knows how to end and, for that, it gets some props.

But it’s not enough to get a recommendation that you should spend eighty minutes of your time with it. Overall, it is a misfire and a reminder of just what happens when you take a similar concept and do it better. If you want to watch a good possession movie, check out The Exorcist or The Conjuring. If you want to watch a movie where a magical corpse runs amok on some coroners, watch The Autopsy of Jane Doe. But The Possession of Hannah Grace is a mostly forgettable endeavor. Spend your time with something that’s worth remembering.

What did you think of The Possession of Hannah Grace? Have you seen The Autopsy of Jane Doe? Let us know in the comments!

The Possession of Hannah Grace was released in the US on November 30, 2018. For full international release dates, see here.