The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018)

The Possession of Hannah Grace arrives as a modest specimen: a 2018 supernatural chiller from Screen Gems, shot for a reported $7.7 million, blessed with a 22 percent approval rating, and dismissed by most critics as a stitched-together mess. It concerns Megan Reed, an ex-Boston cop fresh from rehab, who takes the graveyard shift in a hospital morgue and finds her newest intake, a burned and stabbed young woman named Hannah Grace, refusing to stay respectfully dead. The film is lean, cheap in a budget-conscious way, and entirely uninterested in the moral instruction of its audience.

On the matter of representation, the film casts with a certain quiet diversity. Shay Mitchell, of Filipino descent, headlines as the troubled protagonist, and Jacob Ming-Trent appears as a hospital security guard. Neither performance arrives carrying a thesis. The film simply casts, and moves on, declining to remark upon what it has done. A woman anchors the story as both hero and demonic vessel, which is pleasant enough, though the arrangement owes everything to genre mechanics and nothing to argument. Depression and pill addiction supply the demon with its foothold and Megan with her arc, functioning as plot furniture instead of advocacy.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No LGBTQ characters appear. Race goes unexamined. The brutalist morgue, portrayed by Boston City Hall, is a fine piece of architecture and not a critique of anything. There is no sermon here, no lecture, no finger wagging. The film wants only to make us jump, and mostly fails, per the consensus. We are left with a corpse that heals itself with each kill, a father with a pillow, and a final fly landing on a mirror. It is not a meaningful film. It is not trying to be.