Jessabelle (2014)

Jessabelle arrives from Blumhouse by way of Kevin Greutert, a director who cut his teeth on the later Saw installments, and it wears that pedigree without shame. Sarah Snook plays Jessie, a pregnant woman who loses her fiancé and her unborn child to a truck, then loses the use of her legs, then returns to her estranged father's decaying Louisiana house to be haunted by a wet-haired apparition and a stack of videotapes from her dead mother. The bayou is photographed well. The scares are loud. The critics were unmoved, and we can see why, though Snook's commitment is genuine.

The plot's engine is an old Southern sin: an interracial affair at a country church, a biracial daughter named Jessabelle, and a father who snaps the infant's spine and burns the other man alive to keep the secret. Race here is a mechanism of the ghost story, a source of buried shame and buried bones. It never coheres into an argument about anything larger. The supporting cast includes Black and Latina performers who move through the film without the screenplay pausing to congratulate itself on their presence.

The heroine is a traumatized woman in a wheelchair, and the film uses both conditions as machinery: the chair traps her in rooms, the grief makes her pliable for the thing in the mirror. Neither is offered as a statement. There is no sermon in the final act, no lesson appended, no appeal to our conscience. Jessabelle wants to frighten us and to deliver a twist that the Village Voice found dopey and that I found, on reflection, admirably committed to its own ludicrousness. It is a modest, grubby, competent piece of Southern Gothic craft, and it has no interest in telling us how to live. That is its small, honest virtue.