30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 3: THE POSSESSION (2012)

The Possession is not the only recent horror movie to concern itself with a disenfranchised father's effort to save his child from demonic possession; for a much better example of that, we only need to look as far back as Intruders, or Insidious.  It's not even the first movie to boast a Jewish exorcism: David Goyer's laughable The Unborn got there first.  The Possession really isn't anything more than an mediocre take on familiar horror themes, with little new to enrich them except some noteworthy performances.

It does, however, have a pretty creepy box. The “possession” of the title refers not only to the demonic takeover of a person’s body, but also to an object. In this case it’s an ominous wooden box with obscure Hebrew writing on it, found at the yard sale of a paraplegic old woman. It catches the attention of young Em (Natasha Calis), who begs her father Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to buy it for her. After they take it home, Em becomes obsessed with the box; she has conversations with it, and attacks anyone who tries to take it away from her. Then she finds a way to open it, and becomes a different person altogether.

It doesn't take long for Clyde to figure out that Em has been possessed by a dybbuk, an ancient Jewish demon.  The trick is convincing Em's skeptical mother Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick), from whom he has recently separated.  Stephanie is one of those wet blankets who insists that Clyde feed their kids boring old vegetables instead of pizza, and harangues him about spending too much time at work rather than with the kids.  It doesn't help that Stephanie's been dating a stiff-shirt dentist named Brett (Grant Show) who makes Mitt Romney look like one of the Sugarhill Gang.  Stephanie sees what's been happening to Em and of course blames Clyde, because the script requires her to.

Sedgwick is a fine actress, but she fails at convincing us that Stephanie is as dumb as she's written to be. (If you guessed that toward the end she sees the error of her ways, they patch things up, and everyone is reunited as one big happy family, a gold Star of David for you.)  Show, however, hits just the right note as the perpetually smiling, gratingly bland Brett, and his comeuppance is one of the movie's few standout scenes.

Director Ole Bornedal, who's been a successful director of thrillers in his home country of Denmark but hasn't quite made a hit stateside (his only other American film of note was the lackluster Nightwatch, starring Ewan McGregor and Nick Nolte), knows how to fill the film with a looming sense of abandonment.  He mines an effective mood out of the setting of Clyde's new house--he's one of the first to move into a new development in a seemingly deserted area--which helps to enhance the stakes of Em's possession, which could leave Clyde shunned by his family and all alone.

Morgan gives a decent, sympathetic performance as Clyde, and we sense that his dedication to Em is genuine.  Calis is superb as the possessee, taking a cue from Linda Blair and never letting us forget that there is a little girl behind the demon voice.  The quiet early scenes of her possession are actually very chilling and suspenseful, especially one in which Clyde attempts to read the Torah to her, which is not met well by the dybbuk.

Other, less subtle scenes aren't so effective.  The locust motif, in which characters occasionally enter rooms to find them filled with bugs, is labored.  By the time Hasidic rapper Matisyahu comes in as a young rabbi charged with exorcising the spirit, the movie has run out of ideas, never minding that Matisyahu's skills as an actor are limited.  The requisite cast-thee-out exorcism has been seen and done, albeit rarely in Hebrew.  The climactic hospital chase is a yawner.

The Possession is a classy thriller, but is content to be merely average.

** out of ****