Review of The Possession of Michael King (2014) by Crim — 02 Aug 2015

The title just gives it all away, doesn't it? The first part of the movie tries to play coy as an "angry white guy who lost his wife now embarks onto a not-as-unique-as-he-thinks docutrip (found footage pretext) to disprove the supernatural, occultists, all that." It's pretty well executed: the setup means that anything cringe-worthy can be intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

But then the movie has to deliver. And it does. With a few caveats. First of all, the demonologist helpfully read the description of the demon and this was filmed, so it should have been pretty obvious what the noises and the ants were about; this is never explicitly mentioned and the guy visits the necromancer first. Furthermore, at the end he says that the noise that initially drove him crazy was not actually the demon, but angels trying to protect him, which made no sense and was a completely pointless line to boot.

Secondly, after he'd realized that he was irrevocably possessed, that it was a fight he was losing, that he was hurting others and himself, that everything was becoming unreal and he was losing sensation... he patched himself up. Why? He did try to kill himself later, in a scene that also made very, very little sense.

Third, the daughter was treated as a prop for the entire movie. The guy was shown as consumed with his quest, and there was no mentioning, even from the psychologist/psychiatrist, that she existed and needed her father. I don't normally care for this familial stuff, but here it was a tad jarring: at first I thought he was living with his sister and her daughter. Why was the daughter included? For the "emotional stakes" of him struggling to not harm her. And that is just cheap and cliched. Here we have a relationship that was not established at all, yet used for the ending because parental love is a default, a free card to play.

Fourth, the ending. The movie completely changed tone, it got the nice spiritual touch, used the daughter, and became sentimental all in one scene. I'm subtracting a full star just for that. At least there weren't any angels flying to take his soul up stairs of light. It was close, though.