Anything for Jackson

I was really looking forward to this one. I loved the idea, a couple looking to imbue the spirit of their dead grandson into the body of an unborn child to “bring him back”. It sounds haunting and sad, a way to have sympathetic, complex villains and tell a story of sorrow and horror. In practice, however, the movie is a structural mess and ruins the goodwill of the idea itself. The movie is constantly forgetting things it establishes, like the room where the pregnant protagonist is being held captive being soundproof, for the sake of moving the plot along. Worse yet, it sometimes doesn’t clearly establish rules to its supernatural world, or sets them and then violates them. Ghosts from Hell only seem to torment people by appearing, until the movie needs them to physically interact with people, or possess people and drive them to so horrific things. And then there’s the mess of an ending, where a new villain is dropped into the mix out of nowhere, and drops in a dose of “you didn’t read the document enough, there’s more to it!” for good measure. And after a rushed and unsatisfying climax, the final sequence ends on a big WTF. I will say it’s not boring and it’s well acted. For the most part, the atmosphere is nice, even if the jump scares are a little overdone. But the janky script, inconsistent rules, and bullshit ending drag this movie down from the heights it should achieve.