Metacritic reviews

Like "The Exorcist," the best film in the genre, it is inspired by some degree of religious scholarship and creates believable characters in a real world. That religions take demonic possessions seriously makes them more fun for us, the unpossessed.

This variation on the demon child subgenre has enough of the familiar and the new to be a decently good time at the movies.

Ole Bornedal's film hits enough high notes to make it a worthwhile addition to the exorcism-film heap, somewhere in the lower middle.

Representing a sort of equal opportunity religious variation on an all-too-familiar theme, The Possession is a Jewish-themed "Exorcist" that, if nothing else, should discourage the practice of buying antique wooden boxes at flea markets.

A ho-hum exorcism chiller that tries to spice up a formulaic screenplay by converting a predominantly Catholic-fixated horror subgenre to Judaism.

Here everything feels limp – simultaneously over and undercooked. It doesn't leave much of an impression and every scare seems to be either some lame jump scare or a fright inflicted by the shrill score.

Bornedal's fondness for punctuating abrupt cuts to black with a solitary piano-key note is so pathological that it soon turns risible.

The Possession attempts to breathe new life into a creaky old subgenre by taking its exorcist and demon from Jewish mythology, but even this backfires: The casting of Jewish reggae star Matisyahu would be distracting even if he weren't introduced singing softly to himself.

Bornedal invests so much time in the characters - Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick play the split parents of the girls - that there are times you will forget this is a horror movie. It's Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Lucifer.

Remarkable only in how brazenly it embraces the tired yet proven formula that these modern ghost tales deal in.