The Possession

A young girl named Em Brenek picks up an old wooden box at a yard sale, and her parents initially treat her sudden attachment to it as a harmless phase. As her behaviour turns increasingly aggressive, Clyde and his ex-wife Stephanie come to suspect that something malevolent has attached itself to their daughter. The box, it turns out, was made to hold a Dibbuk, a spirit from Jewish tradition that inhabits and ultimately consumes the person it possesses. Father and mother set aside their separation to find a way to free their child.

Ole Bornedal directed The Possession, which sits fifth in the chronological list of his features, between The Substitute and The Shadow in My Eye. Juliet Snowden and Stiles White wrote the screenplay, and Sam Raimi was among the producers. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Clyde, Kyra Sedgwick plays Stephanie, and Natasha Calis plays Em, with Madison Davenport as her sister Hannah and the musician Matisyahu as Tzadok Shapir. The film runs 92 minutes and was made for about 14 million US dollars, going on to take roughly 85 million worldwide.

It is a Canadian-American production from Lionsgate, Ghost House Pictures and North Box Productions, released at the end of August 2012 and classified as drama, horror and thriller. On IMDb it holds 5.9 out of 10 from around 66,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6 out of 10 from a much smaller pool of roughly 1,700 votes; a critics' rating of 5.2 out of 10 rests on 98 reviews.