In short: The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018)

An incident that left her partner dead resulted in young police officer Megan Reed (Shay Mitchell) slipping into addiction. She has been clean again now for some time, and is starting a new job as the night shift intake assistant for an urban hospital’s morgue. Because nothing is better to improve a woman’s mental health than working nights with horribly mutilated dead people and little other human contact, apparently.

And that’s before the cadaver of one Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson) comes in on Megan’s second night. Hannah, as the audience knows from the film’s prologue, was possessed by a demon even the Mighty Catholic Church™ couldn’t exorcise. Even now, after having been murdered by her own father, Hannah’s corpse and its guest are rather sprightly and active, providing Megan with a great night on the new job.

Diederik Van Rooijen’s Hannah Grace is a rather frustrating film. There are quite a few elements in its backstory – like Megan’s guilt and addiction, and the whole “guy murders his own daughter” thing – that could make for a dark and deep film in which the demon inside of the corpse puts increasing psychological pressure on the characters, a nice way to explore their states of mind.

Unfortunately, that’s not the direction in which the film is going at all. Instead it’s the usual carnival ride body count number with a demon who likes to levitate people to murder them while the camera jitters pointlessly, and nods to Megan’s backstory that go nowhere but the most obvious places. But then Brian Sieve’s script is just full of dubious decisions, so this is only par for the course for the film. Take the whole needless prologue showing us that Hannah was indeed possessed, which means that Megan’s mental state is never really in doubt to the audience, and that turns the slow process of her finding out what the audience has been knowing for ages tedious and pretty pointless. But oh well, let’s put more jump scares in, so nobody will notice.


The few times when the film is not shouting boo every minute or confusing exciting horror sequences with shaking the camera, Van Rooijen does display some good instincts. There are some effective shots of the empty morgue that suggest something much more interesting than just the next jump scare, and the play with light and darkness often works well enough. Too bad there’s so little in the film that makes use of these talents and so much that’s generic in the worst possible way.