The Wandering Review: ‘The Possession’

By Laurie Baron

SAN DIEGO — There are things that go “oy” in the night at a theatre near you.  Who would have predicted that Ole Bornedal’s The Possession, a mainstream Hollywood horror film about a dybbuk would be the hottest box-office draw over the Labor Day weekend?   Based on an allegedly true story reported in the Los Angeles Times, the film chronicles the haunting of Em, frighteningly played by Natasha Calis, following her father’s purchase at her insistence of an antique wooden box with a Hebrew inscription.

Em becomes mesmerized by the whispering emanating from the box and by its strange contents: a gilded moth, a small animal figurine that looks like the Golden Calf, a large tooth, and ring.  Soon Em acts bizarrely with violent outbursts towards those around her.  The obvious diagnosis is that she is upset by her parent’s divorce, her mother’s new boyfriend, and living in her old home with her sister Hannah (Madison Davenport) and mother Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick) on weekdays and with her father father Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) on weekends.  That explanation fails to account for why moths infest her bedroom, objects fly around when she’s angry, her hand turns blue near the finger bearing the ring, and why when she gags as if to vomit a la Linda Blair in The Exorcist there are two fingers emerging from inside her throat.

Suspecting the Hebrew inscriptions might hold the key to his daughter’s behavior, Clyde embarks on his own research.  He looks through YouTube videos of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish exorcisms.  He reads Psalm 91 to Em: “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord.  He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”  When that doesn’t work (perhaps dybbuks don’t understand English), he drives to Borough Park on Shabbat and finds a Chasid aptly named Tzadok (righteous) hanging outside a Shtiebel, engrossed in the music on his IPod, which I felt was a clever, albeit profane, way to introduce the audience to the character played by the erstwhile Chassidic Reggae singer Matisyahu.  Tzadok brings Clyde inside his father the Rebbe’s congregation who interrogates him in Yiddish.  The Rebbe identifies the box as a prison for a dybbuk, but refuses to perform an exorcism on the grounds that it is too dangerous.  Tzadok, however, agrees and remarks it is permitted to cast out dybbuks on Shabbat because it is a matter of life or death.

Unfortunately, Tzadok and the more overtly Jewish material enter too late in the film.   Up to that point, it has been a standard possession flick with only a couple of shocks that make you jump in your seat.  To perform the exorcism, Tzadok must find out the name of the soul that has cleaved to Em’s body.  Em is inhabited by Abizou, the taker of children.  The confrontation between Tzadok and Abizou resembles the encounter between Father Merrin and Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist minus the Catholic theology. Tzadok dons his tallit, recites Psalm 91, and then repeats the name Abizou which empties Em’s eyes of their pupils, contorts her body, and elicits the raspy voice of Abizou to curse the proceedings.  Since I am not a fan of horror movies, I cannot tell you how original these special effects are, only that I was scared by some scenes like the fingers in Em’s throat or the shadowy MRI image of the dybbuk inside Em’s abdomen.  But then again I had nightmares from watching the Republican Convention and am convinced that there was a dybbuk channeling through Clint Eastwood

Dybbuks usually possess their hosts either to punish someone for not fulfilling a vow like the pledged but spurned bridegroom in the Yiddish classic The Dybbuk (1937) or to assist the host to accomplish something that the dybbuk achieved in its former life.  While Abizou contents herself with haunting children, In Ancient Near Eastern mythology Abizou is an infertile demon who causes miscarriages and stillbirths.  She attaches herself to children because that’s the only way she can become a mother.  Another narrative approach might view Abizou as a woman whose own children perished in the Holocaust.  The film mentions that the box dates back to interwar Poland.  In the story which inspired the movie, the box originally was owned by a Holocaust survivor.  As it stands, the motive for Abizou’s choice of victim is underdeveloped.

There are other aspects of the story that don’t seem kosher.  Do moths hold any meaning in Jewish folklore and mysticism?  Similarly, the significance of the tooth and the figurine are never clarified.  The real box contained locks of hair which might have been sheared from Abizou’s former hosts.  Though Tzadok alone performs the ceremony, Jewish exorcisms usually require a minyan and entail blowing a Shofar to free the host from its possessor.  And would a pious Rebbe and his congregants excuse themselves from saving a life because it’s too risky?

If you doubt the veracity of The Possession and its Jewish authenticity, you might want to look at the film’s official website: http://thepossessionmovie.com/index.html#/home. When you run your cursor over each menu categories, the Hebrew term appears. There are links to the original Los Angeles Times story and the EBay listing for the box which describes what had befallen the owners of the box (more a wine cabinet with the first paragraph of the Sh’ma etched on it).  The Times’ story suggests that the “jinx” associated with the box may have been a hoax to increase the bidding on EBay,  There is also a cursory introduction to Jewish mysticism and a glossary of Hebrew words with their Wikipedia entries.  Given the movie’s ending and the current foreclosure crisis, I anticipate that the sequel to The Possession will be entitled The Repossession.

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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University.  He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011).    He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com