‘The Possession of Hannah Grace’ Review: A Demon Makes for a Noisy Corpse

“The Possession of Hannah Grace” begins with an exorcism — never a good omen. Sure enough, the demon residing inside the body of Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson) proves impossible to expunge, and Hannah is killed as a final attempt to subdue its hold. Later, her mangled, sawed and burned body is delivered to a hospital in Boston, where Megan (Shay Mitchell) has just begun a job on the overnight shift at the morgue. Unfortunately for Megan, a former cop who suffers from panic attacks, she has poor luck in Catholic zombies: Jesus saves, Hannah kills.

Though Hannah’s realistically butchered body is a fright to behold, sound dominates the horror here. The director, Diederik Van Rooijen, establishes a tense mood by alternating between ear-shattering demonism and extended periods of suspenseful silence. This sound scheme is a successful trigger for anxiety, but it quickly exhausts the senses. Megan can hardly go to the bathroom without setting off a hand dryer loud enough to send the audience out of their seats.

Van Rooijen’s overreliance on herky-jerky jump scares is a pity, because the movie that exists in the silence is surprisingly satisfying. The familiar uncanniness of hospitals is heightened through Paula Loos’s production design, so the bare cement walls of Megan’s brutalist morgue inspire chills long before it becomes a house for the undead. It is more eerie to watch Megan peer over Hannah’s gaping wounds with a technician’s composure than it is to witness Hannah’s jaw unhinge in a scream. Jump scares might generate a momentary response, but the only fear that lingers from “The Possession of Hannah Grace” is the suggestion that the devil inspires less terror than the doctor.