Jessabelle

Just like last weekend's The Babadook, Jessabelle is a supernatural thriller that opens with a young pregnant couple getting in a horrific car accident, and the young man perishing in the crash.  The woman, Jessie (Sarah Snook, giving a pleasant and sympathetic performance), loses her baby in the accident, is bound to a wheelchair until she can walk again, and is forced to move in with her emotionally distant and alcoholic father (David Andrews), whom she has not seen in years and resides in a crumbling and decaying old Southern mansion near the Louisiana Bayou.

The house looks like it was built to be the setting for a horror movie, with peeling walls, boarded off rooms and plenty of buried secrets.  As Jessie starts to explore the home while her father is away at work, she uncovers an old box underneath a bed that is labeled in her name.  Within the box are a set of videotapes left behind by her mother (Joelle Carter), who died of cancer when Jessie was young.  Fortunately, dear old dad never upgraded to DVDs, and there's a dusty old VCR hooked up in the living room, so Jessie can watch the contents of the tapes.  The videos display the mother giving a tarot card reading for her soon-to-be-born daughter.  The reading does not go well, and hints at ominous future events.  But, before Jessie can learn more, her father steps in, pulls the tape out of the machine and screams, "That thing on the tape is not your mother!".

The mystery deepens when, though plot developments I won't reveal, Jessie finds herself living alone in the crumbling old family home.  She is soon plagued by nightmares and visions of a ghostly girl, and a man with a burned and disfigured face.  Fortunately, she is able to hook up with an old high school flame right around this time named Preston (Mark Webber, also effective).  Preston is unhappily married, and still has feelings for Jessie, so he agrees to help her uncover the mystery behind the visions and the tapes.  The story that is developed by screenwriter Robert Ben Garant (who before this was known mainly for writing big budget family comedies, like the first two Night at the Museum films) is quite intriguing early on, and director Kevin Greutert (a veteran of the Saw franchise) gives the film an atmospheric and slow burn feel.  But, as the answers pile up, the movie becomes oddly less frightening, and highly derivative of past thrillers like 2005's The Skeleton Key and The Changeling with George C. Scott.

To be absolutely fair, Jessabelle is nowhere near as bad as I was fearing given the journey its taken to the big screen.  It's been shuffled across various release dates over the past year or so, and was finally supposed to be given a wide release in late August, right before Labor Day weekend. (A time studios usually reserve for dumping films they have little confidence in.) But then, the movie got bumped back again, this time to a November release date, and it was only going to play in a small handful of theaters.  I don't know why the film's distributor, LionsGate, has chosen to bury the film like this.  While it's certainly nothing great, I did enjoy it a lot more than some recent paranormal-themed thrillers that wound up playing on over 2,000 screens, such as Ouija, As Above/So Below and Devil's Due.  The fact that this is not a "found footage" horror, like two of the films I just mentioned, almost feels like a point in its favor.

For the first 45 minutes or so of the film, I actually found myself quite involved.  The performances are good, there are a few genuinely unsettling moments, and the mystery grabs your attention.  Little by little, however, the movie betrays that interest, and turns into yet another movie where the heroine is tormented by a ghostly woman with damp hair hanging down its face.  It's never boring, and the acting is strong enough that we don't stop caring about the characters, but the script just has absolutely nothing new to offer when it comes to its scares.  When the tone of the film starts turning to voodoo cults, it's actually pretty easy to figure out where the story is going long before it gets there.  Finally, the film's final moments raise a very big question that the movie chooses to ignore - Do ghosts age and mature like living people do?

It's kind of sad that Jessabelle ends on such a sloppy note, because it starts out fairly well thought out.  However, it's not the worst thing out there, and if you ever catch it some night on the SyFy Channel, it will hold your interest for a while.  But honestly, anyone who chooses to watch this over The Babadook is out of their mind.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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