Possession

Jess (Sarah Michelle Gellar) finds her perfect married life turned upside-down when both her husband Ryan (Michael Landes) and his bad-boy brother Roman (Lee Pace) are sent into comas following a head-on car collision. Roman eventually wakes from his coma, but seems convinced that he is Ryan. Will Jess believe that her husband's spirit has somehow passed into the body of his brother, or will she call bulls**t?

It doesn't surprise me at all to find that Possession is a remake of an Asian film: it stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, it moves like molasses, and the messy plot sure takes some swallowing. The title promises supernatural shenanigans, and for most of the film, that is precisely what we are led to believe we are watching; but as the film progresses (very, very slowly) to the less than scintillating finale, it becomes apparent that there is nothing supernatural about the story whatsoever. Personally, I felt more than a tad cheated: I watched the film with the expectation of a spooky chiller, but what I got was a psychological thriller-cum-romance instead. And a pretty poor one at that!

Edit *** I've just watched Addicted, the Korean film on which this was based; it is also a very slow-moving film, but a much more worthwhile effort overall—classy and subtle, where Possession is just clumsy ***