A young girl finds a mysterious box at school. When she takes it home, she soon realizes she brought home more than an empty box.
Lily's (Nancy Boo Orchis-Evans) asleep. She wakes up because she hears a creaking noise. She rolls over. In the corner, her rocking horse rocks by itself. Lily rubs her eyes. She looks again. The horse is still rocking. Lily's Bumble Ball activates and falls off the nightstand. She ducks under the covers.
The noises get quieter, but don't stop entirely. Lily musters up the courage to run to her mom's bedroom. She wakes up her mom, Linda (Jessica Messenger). She tells her mom someone's in her room. Her mom asks if she's sure she didn't have a bad dream. Lily says a girl named Annie is in her room. Linda asks for if Annie's one of her friends. Lily explains Annie isn't a friend, but a girl who lives inside a box she found at her school. Before leaving school, she showed the box to her friend, Lacy, and her friend's grandmother. The grandmother told the girls it's a dybbuk box (a box with a spirit residing in it).
Lily's mom hugs her. She says Lacy's grandmother shouldn't have told them a story like that. Linda explains Annie isn't real because it's not possible for someone to live inside a box. Lily makes her pinky promise that she's telling the truth. She does so and tries to tell Lily a story about when she got scared as a child. A loud thump interrupts her. Linda nervously offers to let Lily sleep with her. She tucks Lily in and leaves the room to get pillows.
The mom hears laughing and bumping coming from Lily's room. She opens the door. Stuffed animals and toys lay on the floor. She's shocked and doesn't know what to think. It's cold enough Linda's breath puffs in front of her face. As she turns to leave, she hears a tune from a music box. Linda crawls under Lily's bed and finds Annie's box.
There's a creaking noise. Linda looks around. She sees Annie (Katy Marie Brook; however, the character is referred to as Annabelle on the IMDB page) laying on her stomach on the floor and looking at her. The lights in Lily's room flicker, the door slams shut, and the rocking horse begins rocking by itself. Linda screams and gets out from under the bed. For a moment, Annie momentarily appears as she rides the rocking horse. Linda continues to scream as she runs across the room.
Lily hears her mom scream. She screams, too, and jumps out of her mom's bed. She runs to the door, but it's shut and won't budge. Lily goes to the wardrobe. She realizes she won't fit inside it, so she hides beside it. Lily hears Annie gasp. She turns and screams.
Linda runs into the bedroom. She's carrying Annie's box. All she can find is her daughter's teddy bear laying on the floor. Linda picks it up. She drops both of the items and looks in the wardrobe. Lily's not in there. She screams for Lily and frantically runs through the house looking for her. Annie's box is laying on its side. The lid is open. The name Annie V is carved into the front of it. Annie's face appears next to the box. She looks into the camera and grins.
A dybbuk is a human spirit that hasn't passed on. Instead, it wanders the earth. Dybbukim have the ability to attach themselves to humans. After attaching itself to a human, the dybbuk can make the human do whatever the spirit wants. 1 They can also harm humans; however, dybbukim usually aren't malicious. 2
Annie was written and directed by Gavin John. This is his first movie. It was good for a first movie. There are some things I would change about it. When Lily says she found a box at school, I wish the mom had asked more questions about it. She didn't want to see the box or how Lily found it in the first place.
How the friend's grandmother knew for a fact it was a dybbuk box? It sounds a bit suspicious that Lily finds a random box laying around and the grandmother knows it has a supernatural entity inside it after seeing it for only a few minutes. I hope the grandmother didn't set Lily up to take the dybbuk home in order to save her own (grandmother's) family. I understand protecting your own family, but sacrificing another family to a supernatural entity is really disturbing. Also, if Lily were so worried about the dybbuk, why did she still take the box home?
I think I think I saw a goof, but I'm not sure. The mom said she would get extra pillows, but she went to Lily's room to check on the noises instead. When Lily jumped out of the mom's bed, it looked like there were extra pillows already laying next to her head.
There were also several things I liked about Annie. Jessica Messenger and Nancy Boo Orchis-Evans work well together as mother and daughter. Annie was creepy. The first time we see Annie was spooky. She was laying on the floor staring at Linda. When she was laying on the floor in Lily's room, it looked like Annie possibly had blood on her face. Did she kill someone else earlier in the day? However, she appeared and disappeared so fast it was hard to see what she was doing sometimes.
Annie reminds me a bit of the 2012 American horror movie The Possession. The Possession is a fictionalized version of several experiences with a malicious dybbuk residing in a small wine cabinet (measuring 12.5" x 7.5" x 16.25"). The wine cabinet was dubbed the Dybbuk Box by one of its owners.
The Box was first sold at an estate sale after its original owner died. A man who restored and sold furniture bought the Dybbuk Box at the estate sale. He began experiencing paranormal activity shortly after that. He eventually got rid of it. Since then, several other people owned the Box (including family members of the man who bought it), but all of them quickly got rid of it after experiencing the same paranormal activity. All of them claim the paranormal activity was evil in nature.
Jason Haxton eventually bought the Box in 2003 from a seller on eBay. Jason wrote about the Box in his book The Dibbuk Box. According to the SyFy show Paranormal Witness, Jason found rabbis who were willing to help him seal the Dybbuk Box. The sealing was successful. Jason later hid the box to protect other people from the entity inside it.
If Gavin John had been inspired to create Annie after hearing about the Dybbuk Box or the movie The Possession, then the plot of Annie would be an interesting theory about why the dybbuk from the Dybbuk Box would harm people. Maybe the dybbuk has to hurt, or kill, humans in order to survive. Alternatively, maybe it just likes hurting people. That could explain how Lily found the box in the first place. The entity inside it wanted someone to find the box and let it out. I prefer this theory to the one where the friend's grandmother knowingly left the box out for Lily to find.
Links
IMDB
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Phobophiliacs promotes constructive communication and debate. However, Phobophiliacs reserves the right to remove any comment that is a personal attack, promotional, generally rude, contains personal information, or doesn't contribute to the topic of the post. No anonymous comments allowed. All comments go through a moderation process. Thank you for following the rules!