The Possession (2012)

The Possession arrives from 2012 with a yard sale, a wooden box, and a Polish whisper promising to eat someone's heart. This is efficient work. A divorced father buys the box for his younger daughter, the daughter opens it, and a dybbuk named Abyzou begins the slow business of taking a child. Sam Raimi produced. Ole Bornedal directed. Nobody involved appears to have had an agenda beyond making an audience uncomfortable in a dark room, which they accomplish with reasonable competence and a forty percent approval rating.

The cultural ledger here is thin, and honesty requires saying so. The cast is white, with the exception of Matisyahu, the Hasidic performer cast as Rabbi Tzadok, and a Brooklyn community of Hasidic extras. That is culturally specific casting for a story built on Jewish folklore, which is a different thing from a diversity initiative. The divorced mother and the two daughters exist as horror-genre furniture, not as a statement about women. There is no LGBTQ presence, no racial commentary, no dying coastline, no critique of the yard sale economy, no celebration of the possessed body, and no engagement with neurodivergence beyond a boyfriend suggesting a psychologist, a suggestion the film discards the moment his teeth start falling out.

Bornedal has said he read the script as an allegory for divorce. The film keeps that reading buried where it belongs, under MRI scans and a rabbi performing a forced ritual in a hospital corridor. The moral instruction is negligible. What remains is a competent possession picture that respects its source folklore, kills a rabbi in the final minute for no clear reason, and leaves the box whispering in the wreckage. We have seen this before. We will see it again.