The Possession (2012)
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| Available at Amazon. |
The story is based on the allegedly haunted dybbuk box. Bornedal cited films like The Exorcist as an inspiration, praising their subtlety.
The film starts with an old woman trying to open a strange box. She turns on old classic music and grabs holy water and a hammer. Before she is able to destroy the box, she is thrown violently around the room by an unseen force. When her son enters, she is unconscious on the floor.
Next, the audience is introduced to newly divorced couple Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Stephanie Brenek (Kyra Sedgwick). They have two children, Em (Natasha Calis) and Hannah (Madison Davenport). Clyde introduces his daughters to his new house.
Clyde and his daughters shop at a yard sale, where Em becomes intrigued by an old box which has Hebrew inscriptions engraved on it. Clyde agrees to buy the box for her. When Em walks around the yard carrying the box, she discovers the old woman lying in bed with her arms and head covered in bandages. Upon seeing the box, the old lady slams her hand against the window, screaming, until her nurse closes the window blinds.
Em asks her father to open the box, but he is unable to and concludes it is not meant to be opened. Em keeps the box in her bedroom and that night, begins to hear whispering coming from inside the box. She is successfully able to open it, and inside it finds a tooth, a corpse of a moth, and a ring, which she begins to wear. Em then falls asleep with the box.
After coming home the next day, Clyde, Hannah and Em hear an animalistic noise in their kitchen and discover food all over the floor. When the intruder escapes through their pet flap, Clyde assumes it was a raccoon.
Em becomes solitary and spends her spare time staring at the box. Her behavior grows increasingly sinister, to the point where she stabs her father in the hand with a fork. One night while Em is in the bathroom, she starts to vomit. She uses a flashlight and points it into her mouth. After a few seconds, a hand is seen crawling up from the back of her mouth. Em is startled, but she doesn't say anything and goes back to bed. The house later becomes infested with moths, mainly clustered in Em's room.
While at school, one of Em's classmates attempts to steal her backpack. He discovers the box inside, and begins to antagonize Em about it. She screams at him to give the box back, but when he refuses, Em strikes him multiple times. Clyde and Stephanie are summoned to a meeting with the principal and Em's teacher, where they discuss Em's growing violence and how she is becoming increasingly antisocial.
Em's teacher recommends that Em spend time away from the box, so it is left in Em's classroom. Later that night, Em's teacher, curious about the noises emanating from the box, tries to open it, but she dies when a malevolent force attacks her and throws her out a window.
Em tells Clyde about an invisible woman (dybbuk) who lives in her box and says Em is "special". Alarmed by her behavior, Clyde attempts to dispose of the box by throwing it in a trash bin. When he returns home, Clyde finds Em, crying, asking what he has done with the box. When Clyde refuses to tell her where the box is, an unseen force suddenly slaps Em, making it seem as if Clyde is abusing her. Em runs away to the exact area where Clyde had disposed of the box. She manages to retrieve it and begins to converse with the dybbuk. Suddenly, moths fly out of the box and into Em's mouth, symbolizing her full possession. Em faints before Clyde can get to her. Clyde carries Em's unconscious body back to his house, where the police and Stephanie wait to take Em away from Clyde. During this time, we also see Clyde returning to pick up the box left by Em.
Clyde, immensely disturbed, takes the box to a professor at the university. The professor tells him it is a dybbuk box that dates back to the 1920s; it was used to contain a broken spirit, an ancient Jewish evil or demon. Clyde sneaks over to Stephanie's house and enters after she and her boyfriend, Brett (Grant Show), leave. Clyde enters Em's room and begins to read the Torah to her. Em stares at him blankly, and the Torah is thrown out of Clyde's hands, causing him to retreat.
Clyde immediately travels to a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, and learns from a Jew named Tzadok (Matisyahu) that the possession has three main stages; in the third stage the dybbuk latches onto the host, becoming one entity with it. The only way to defeat the dybbuk is to lock it back into the box via a forced ritual. While further examining the box, Tzadok discovers the demon's name is Abizu, which he explains is the "taker of children".
At home, Brett finds Em in the garage, acting strangely. He notices that she has something in her hand and asks her to show it to him. He grabs Em's hand and opens it when she does not comply and discovers a molar. As Brett focuses on the tooth, Em begins to gag, and a hand is seen crawling up from inside of her cheek, but this ends before Brett notices.
Later that evening, Em violently attacks her mother when Stephanie discovers her gorging herself like an animal out of the refrigerator. Brett suggests that Em be examined by a psychologist.
The next morning, Brett prepares to take Em to the psychologist. However, when Em stares blankly at Brett, his mouth begins gushing blood and his teeth begin falling out, causing him to drive away frantically. Em then has a seizure on the front lawn and is discovered by Hannah and Stephanie, who call 9-1-1. Em is taken to the hospital for an MRI. During the procedure, the lights begin to flicker, and the machinery begins to malfunction, and Stephanie and Hannah are horrified when they see the dybbuk's face in the images, next to Em's heart.
Stephanie then realizes that Em is possessed. Clyde and Tzadok join the rest of the family at the hospital and attempt to conduct an exorcism in the physical therapy room. Before they begin, Tzadok requires everyone present to put a valuable item of his or hers into the box. The exorcism begins, but Em breaks free from her family and attacks Tzadok. Em escapes to the morgue with Clyde in close pursuit. Em attacks Clyde, and he survives but is now possessed by the dybbuk. Tzadok performs an exorcism which is successful; the dybbuk crawls out of Clyde and back into the box.
The family is reunited, with Clyde and Stephanie's love rekindled. Tzadok drives away with the box in Clyde's vehicle. Minutes after telling Clyde he will ask his rabbi father what to do with the box, his car is suddenly hit by a truck, apparently killing him.
As the camera pulls out from the car crash, the box is seen, having landed several feet from the wreckage.
