
The film POSSESSIONS directed and written by Brent Cote (Tainted), will be most appreciated by fans of the horror-thriller series as it tells how the genre plot can be tired and mundane. The film stars Clive Standen (of the Vikings TV series), Yeardley Smith (of the Simpsons, Maximum Overdrive), and Mason Wells (The Wonder Years reboot 2023) and the actors do paint some details, however, the movie has nothing new to offer and struggles to come out of its cliched approaches leading to it being devoid of any intriguing plot lines a decent story or authentic thrills.
In an attempt to get a new beginning after the death of his wife the widowed father Pete (Standen) travels with their young son Tyler (Wells) across the country and buys the Plaza Square Storage facility, where a murder occurred, sometime back. Believing that he has found a great deal on the property Pete is eager to fulfill his dream of being a businessman. However, there is far worse than the ransom for the owed payment from each one of the units: a dark force by the name of Vader resides behind metal doors. As Pete struggles with clearing the payments and researching the storage facility, Tyler decides to investigate the strange units, and before long he is welcome into the dreams of a bizarre entity, which causes plenty of inexplicable events and dark dreams. Dr. Young Smith a therapist shows up at the scene of the crime in the hopes of helping her patient Tyler. What Tyler doesn’t know is that by the time it is all over, the truth will come out and maybe it is already too late.
It’s true that the idea of the storage unit as a site of terror is not a new one and has been the theme of dozens of films within this genre for the last fifteen years. Examples include Lot 36 (2022), Self Storage (2013), and Storage 24 (2012) among others. One of the most annoying problems about POSSESSIONS is that it does not grab in the audience with an interesting style concept and instead uses a host of boring attempts at scares and predictable jump scares most of which fail under Cote’s dull direction. The script makes very little attempt to keep the audience’s expectations in check and on the opposite manages to reach horror’s new lows by relying on hacks and gimmicks instead. Instead of fully utilizing its menacing premise with artistic direction and disturbing environments, Cote depicts an overly basic and unoriginal trail into the most uneventful place where the next twist can be predicted without any effort and the next scare will only force the viewer to roll their eyes.
In terms of the acting POSSESSIONS does not do any better either as it remains a huge letdown, thanks to the subpar performances put in by almost all actors. Taken in the first spot Standen is a pretty capable actor, but in this case, he is unfortunately given a character that is completely uninteresting and has no real motivation to engage with the viewers, and just trudges along from one scene to the next. It is difficult to empathize with a character when one has no real chance to actually connect with the character due to its strange actions or silly decisions. The same goes for Yeardley and Wells, whose help was needed for unfamiliar supporting parts, and who are just here to earn some quick money by performing very basic functions. The facts are that characters fall in the category of overlooked objects, they are no more useful than trash emptied out of the well-used storage room edges. So quite regrettably there isn’t much to hold onto.
To sum up, POSSESSIONS is a horror-thriller that neither frightens nor thrills, in fact, it is plain dull. Forget about being locked in a storeroom which is haunted, the most frightening thing about this movie is 90 minutes of utter boredom and a multitude of half-baked horror film tropes.
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