MOVIE REVIEW: Jessabelle

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Published Dec 19, 2014

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JESSABELLE

DIRECTOR: Kevin Greutert

CAST: Sara Snook, David Andrew, Joelle Carter and |Mark Webber,

CLASSIFICATION: 16 VH

RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes

RATING: **

Jessabelle is unlikely to be boosted by an overly familiar premise that bears too much similarity to many recent releases: it focuses on Jessie (Snook, pictured), who’s released from a Louisiana hospital two months after a car accident that killed her boyfriend and terminated her pregnancy, forcing her to rely on her estranged father Leon (Andrews) for support.

He’s not enthused to be reunited with his daughter, particularly since she’s wheelchair-bound while recovering from two broken legs, leaving him no alternative but to bring her back to the bayou home where she grew up after her mother Kate (Carter) died shortly after her birth.

It’s a brooding brick house still concealing dark family secrets that Jessie only begins to understand as she starts watching VHS tapes that she finds in a box labelled “Jessabelle” among Kate’s possessions. In the tapes her pregnant mother speaks directly to the camera, hinting at her tumultuous relationship with Leon as she conducts a series of ominous tarot readings for Jessabelle, indicating that there’s a mysterious female presence in the house watching her. At the same time, Jessie begins to experience frightening ghostly visitations in her mother’s bedroom where she’s confined, along with terrifying nightmares and strange noises around the big house when her father is out.

Even after a terrifying corpse-like woman who only Jessie can see attacks her, Leon won’t discuss the unexpected illness that killed her mother years ago. When he discovers that she’s been watching more of Kate’s tapes, Leon attempts to burn them, but the fire quickly leaps out of control, killing him. At his funeral, Jessie re-encounters her former high school boyfriend Preston (Webber), now married but still carrying a torch for her. He expresses his alarm after she relates the frightening events transpiring at her house and resolves to protect her, but the violent hauntings quickly reveal that neither one of them is prepared to deal with the sinister forces they’re up against.

Although screenwriter Robert Ben Garant begins the film on a distinctly Southern Gothic note, a different type of regionalism takes over as the demon discloses its true intentions. However, Garant’s gradual revelation that traditional Haitian voodoo rites and a related curse may be the source of her predicament is handled unevenly, initially revealed only partially through Jessie’s recurring nightmares and cryptic comments from minor characters, before awkwardly introduced plot developments clarify the extent of her mother’s connection to a menacing man involved with an unconventional local church.

With the exception of the tapes featuring mother, director and editor Greutert abandons the found-footage approach, settling on an atmospheric style that draws on the film’s rural Louisiana setting and familiar haunted house genre conventions. The too-infrequent scare techniques, however, are mostly by the book.

Snook finds scant opportunity to develop Jessie’s character beyond the generic template laid out by the film-makers.

Had Webber’s Preston appeared earlier on the movie, he might have seemed more integral to the plot.

As the malevolent spirit haunting Jessie, Amber Stevens makes a gratifyingly repellent impression. – The Hollywood Reporter

If you liked Annabelle or Deliver Us From Evil, you will like this.

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