Review: Lovely Molly 2011

Fierce, grisly, and extreme, “Lovely Molly”, is not an easy watch, but I loved (almost) every minute of it! Another one that wasn’t well-received *sigh* maybe I just have terrible taste haha but I thought this was really good. A horrific tale of abuse beyond the grave. Except…that wasn’t actually what the filmmakers were going for…in fact, “Lovely Molly” was originally going to be released as “The Possession”, suggesting a possession theme which I actually didn’t get… To me, this movie works much better as half ghost story/half descent into madness, maybe that’s why it wasn’t well received, because it didn’t do a very good job of explaining this alleged possession aspect.. Regardless though, I think this movie is like a happy accident, the filmmakers may have failed to get their intended point across, but I think, especially with title like “Lovely Molly”, it works very well in a different way.
“Lovely Molly” is shot in a fairly hap-hazard manner, it starts almost at the end, then we see much of the film as flashbacks and some of the footage is done with a handheld camera, from Molly’s point of view.
Molly is recently married and she and her husband, Tim, move into her old childhood home after their wedding. Molly is also a recovering heroin addict, and she clearly has some “demons” in her past(yeah, that’s about as far as I get with the intended “possession” theme). Her husband, Tim, is a trucker, so he is away for a few days at a time, once he leaves Molly alone in the house, Molly’s behaviour becomes increasingly concerning. As far as I’m concerned this movie is about a woman with repressed trauma, she returns to her childhood home and something, both within the home, and within Molly, herself, is triggered. I don’t believe that everything is in Molly’s head, there is definitely a presence in the house with her and it is purposely driving her mad. This is another one that has a weird, not so good, ending… It’s as if the filmmakers take one last feeble shot at trying to tell us that there’s a ‘demonic’ theme to this movie… I really do think that that theme only works in a metaphorical sense though, if we take the ending to mean simply that Molly has “surrendered to her demons”, then I can be content with it. “Lovely Molly” is on Canadian Netflix currently, brace yourself and give it a try!