The Danish filmmaker Gabriel Bier Gislason has brought a new type of film about demonic possession to the Shudder platform. His latest work, “Attachment,” starred Ellie Kendrick (Game of Thrones), Sofie Gråbøl (The House That Jack Built), Josephine Park (The Venus Effect) and David Dencik (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, No Time to Die). This movie depicts the story of Maja and Leah who meet and fall in love very quickly. After spending some time together, Leah has an untriggered seizure causing Maja to join her in London with her mother Chana as her caretaker.
Through getting to know Chana and becoming more involved in the family’s Jewish heritage, Maja comes to believe that Chana is hiding something about her daughter Leah and possibly making her condition worse. Maja starts uncovering the dark history between Leah and her mother realizing that it might go way beyond your everyday mother-daughter relationship.
The greatest strength of Attachment lies in its cast. Almost everyone will recognize Ellie Kendrick from Game of Thrones as Meera Reed but this movie provided an opportunity for her to give a strong performance in a leading role which she does brilliantly. The actress managed to show versatility by switching between playing normal girl friend for Maya one moment and then being completely inhabited by dark presence; we have never seen such before from this actress. Also worthy of note was Josephine Park’s portrayal of Maja which I thought was excellent as she demonstrated both a fearful and introverted character who had driven herself into a corner once she had felt that life was endangered for the person whom she loved most deeply on earth. However, there were moments when their relationship progressed too fast in the film for me feel like Maya would be so attached already. Yet it was good that it focused on an LGBTQ+ relationship because not enough horror films or movies at large do that aspect justice. Even better, the film never had to carry a forced subplot of gay being wrong and instead just took it as a normal same-sex relationship. A kind of representation that is important, not ignored, and should be used more often in exactly this way.
The best performance in the movie was Sofie Gråbøl’s portrayal of Leah’s mother, Chana. From the outside, it may seem like Chana is just very devout in her Jewish religion but through her dialogue and actions we can see she only does these things because she loves her daughter too much. All three actresses were engaging and worked well together with such chemistry that made their scenes feel like they were challenging one another to keep up with their own amazing performances. David Dencik played Lev an “exorcising” Rabbi who was at once enigmatic yet relatable.
Attachment, unlike most exorcism and possession films, explores folklore that is rarely mentioned in horror. The film dwells on dybbuk’s history—a ghost-like presence wandering around the human plane searching for a body to overtake; mostly someone suffering from mental or physical sickness. Due to this, Attachment sets itself apart from other films of this same sub-genre because of its unique lore about the dybbuk. What distinguishes it from other such movies is that it deviates from the normal storylines based on exorcism which horror movie lovers have always anticipated seeing in such type of productions. However, this use of marginalized cultures and folklores in horror does give some extra points for originality to this film if nothing else. Likewise, even though different from most films, the exorcism offers a particular view of cultural aspects involved when dealing with malevolent forces.
However, one serious problem with Attachment is its pacing. While there is an understanding about Chana and Leigh’s relationship developing into an intense inflammable one, there occurs a point where it becomes pretty clear early enough that there are evil forces at work behind all these events taking place while much time had been spent earlier on defining the volatility between mother-daughter pair and Maja which somehow seemed irrelevant since the story veers off in completely unexpected trajectory. Nevertheless, as Leigh stands up against Maja and Chana in its final act—with Leah fiercely defending herself—this should be seen as leading to a meaningful end for these characters. In her description however naïve she was trying to keep her daughter safe had inflicted horrible things on Leigh’s life giving her sorry feelings but simultaneously warming her heart up whereas with all the horror they were going through she came out as not only caring genuinely about her daughter but also trusting fully what would happen next between them both (her daughter and Maja) marking an honest closing note for the movie.
Generally speaking, Attachment is an amazing film worth spending on and it brings about a refreshing perspective on horror’s sub-genre of possession.
Watch free movies on Fmovies
