The Possession

You’ve enjoyed a nice dinner of split-pea and matzoh ball soup, along with a nice chilled glass (or two?) of Mogen David Blackberry wine, you tuck yourself into bed and, around about three in the morning, you sit bolt upright with the brilliant idea “My god! If you combined Yentl and The Exorcist, you’d have a hit movie!”

Well, actually, you’d have The Possession.  Kyra Sedgwick co-stars.  For some reason, she gets third billing after the guy who plays her ex-husband and the girl who plays their daughter.  This is inexplicable.  Although, overall, the acting is fairly flat and it seems like everyone just called it in.

It starts with a woman trying to destroy a wooden box and something happens to her.  (I’m not sure what, as I watched this movie over several weeks because it is just that engaging.)  The primary players though are your typical broken nuclear family – husband/wife split and two daughters and the wife has a new boyfriend.

Dad and the girls are at a yard sale and the youngest takes a liking to the wooden box the woman was trying to destroy (who may be the woman in the full body cast in the house next door that freaks out – which isn’t easy when you’re in a full body cast).  Things start to get creepy with bugs and the little girl just pigging out when she eats and no one noticing the stupid, big, ugly ring she’s now wearing because she <peers around fearfully> figured out how to open the box.  (Nah, no Pinhead inside.  That would have made it too interesting.)

Then things get weird.  Things like the little girl suddenly wearing some drab dress when she’s “teh debil <spooky music>” and people almost getting killed (some people do get killed, some people she just smacks around).  And some maybe getting killed or not (looking at you mom’s boyfriend).  And a rapping Hasidic Jew (technically, he’s not rapping but just singing along) who, later, does a fairly good job at an interpretation of a straight white guy dancing at a disco in the 70s (aka “an exorcism”).  Yes, suddenly this has become something related to the Jewish faith and possession by a dybbuk – the dybbuk that had been locked in the wooden box! Dun dun duh!

Then the girl’s not possessed and the dad is and the Jewish guy keeps on dancing exorcising and then dad’s not possessed and everything is happy happy.  See, the boyfriend is gone.  (Dead? Smarter than everyone else? Got a better gig as a waiter at Chuck E. Cheese?  We don’t know.) So dad is back cooking in the kitchen and everyone’s happy and the Jewish man who exorcised the demon calls from dad’s car (because he needed it to get back to New York City which is 220 miles away) and everything’s OK because he has the wooden box containing the dybbuk and everyone liv… BAM!… hit by a tanker truck.  But not hard enough to cause the burnt out former-car they show.  Or so it seemed to me.  But, you know, had to have some way for the wooden box to get into someone else’s hands for The Possession II – This Time We’re Line Dancing.

The audio on this movie sucked.  Hey, audio engineers:  WTF is up with your jobs?  Can’t hear the dialog, so I crank up the sound, and then BLAM LET’S BURST THEIR EARDRUMS AND BREAK SOME WINDOWS WITH LOUD MUSIC AND/OR SOUND EFFECTS.  Whomever is making that decision just needs to be locked in a room with Yoko Ono for a week.

Continuity or editing kind of falls apart at the end with a couple of “wut…wait…huh?” scenes.  Are we at a hospital?  Are we at a school?  Physical therapy room!  Run, no one will see us!  Oh, a morgue.  Must be the hospital.  Obligatory “dad hit me” and “you can’t take away my girls” scenes that really don’t fit.  At all.

One creepy scene involving the little girl.  If you’re the kind of person who’s ever spent long nights wondering “I wonder what it would look like if someone were trying to crawl out of my mouth”, this movie will answer that question.  But it will leave you with many other questions: “What the hell are those damned bugs anyway?  What the hell did he/she say?  Why the hell am I still watching this?  Christ, why didn’t I buy two gallons of vodka at the store?  If I could go back in time and show this movie to Hitler, would I?”  And, possibly, many others that will leave you in a cold sweat.

There is one positive note here for children of divorce:  getting possessed by a dybbuk will bring your family together.  (Not really. Do not try this at home or anywhere, including the mall.)