Review: The Possession Diaries

Director: Juan J. Frausto

Screenplay: Juan J. Frausto

Year: 2019

Synopsis: Rebecca Clarkson starts suffering demonic attacks after one night she played with a Ouija board. She decides to document her experience in a series of videos to show that possessions are real. The attacks soon become violent and Rebecca must fight for her soul.

“The Possession Diaries: starts with the protagonist Rebecca convinced that she is being possessed and decides to document the process as a video diary. From this moment the problems of this movie started. I do not think that it is probable that someone suspecting that it is being possessed will be worried about recording this process, although seeing what some people are capable of for just a few seconds of fame on the internet, this idea does not sound so crazy.

Well then, our protagonist decides to document her possession and a good part of what we see in the movie is from the perspective of the computer where she records the events. In effect, our protagonist seems to be being attacked by evil forces, which are simply referred to as the devil; not a demon in particular, but just ambiguously the devil. A simple search would have given the name of some demon in which to base this possession and give it a more realistic feel to it. This is just one of the problems of the screenplay.

The screenplay, like the rest of the movie, feels very amateur. In many parts, it tries to over explain what happens on screen through the dialogs, which make it look dumb. The dialogs, in general, are not attractive and similarly, they over explain things that are unnecessary. The story does not have much spark to it that can help it, and on top of that, the decisions the characters make seem more motivated to go from scene to scene and not by a structural logic.

The visual effects are weak, even for a movie with a low budget. The sound effects do not do much help, as many times they do not correctly represent what is happening on screen or try to be horrific and are left far from being so. The acting is also below what is expected, and the characters have nothing interesting that supports them but are a composite of badly acted clichés. This deficient acting makes the moments that should be horrific accidentally funny.

Finishing “The Possession Diaries” was a task. Fewer times have I felt so frustrated and uninterested in a horror movie and this one took me there. Besides some makeup effects, this movie had nothing that seemed interesting to me.

“The Possession Diaries” will be available on video-on-demand on June 4th.