Hidden in a bedroom, the bored twenty-something unearths a collection of VHS video diaries, her deceased mother's last ditch effort to communicate with Jessie from beyond the grave. On the spooky standard definition television screen, Kate (Joelle Carter) appears upbeat about her simultaneous labor pains and cancer ailments, goofing with her off-screen daughter. That's when the tarot cards come out. Despite reading her unborn child's future, the predictions are all too real in the present.
That pesky “Death” card signals a a disturbance in the force. It doesn't take too long before Jessie is toe-to-toe with a black-haired, pale white, mess-of-a-spirit kicking the living crap out of her at every opportunity. How Kate could predict this from two decades prior, and why the spirit is pissy in the first place, is the film's central mystery... and remains such when the end credits roll. “Answers” is a loose term in Jessabelle.
The film never gets past its main character's physical impediments. There's a vivid world outside the walls of the standard haunted house — hoodoo subcultures, socioeconomic friction, a family history dying to be explored — but all Jessabelle knows how to do is knock Jessie out of her wheelchair and watch her scream. Greutert can't instill vision into these bursts of carnage. The ghost attacks never stem from a reality or personality. Even its gnarliest moment, a scene where Jessie grapples with the ghost in a bathtub full of black, oily goop, can't find footing to build up our paranoia or shock us with a splash of gore. For most of the film, Jessie's plight is chalked up to “just 'cuz.” The scares follow suit. Snook, who retains her pride after the umpteenth tumble, is stuck dragging the interstitial melodrama along.
Adding a romantic interest gives Jessabelle a defibrillator-like jolt, but even that fails to bring it to life. When he hears that his ex-girlfriend is back in town, Preston (Mark Webber) swings by the mansion to care for Jessie, current wife be damned. Webber is a great actor who can make a stock schlub into someone worth caring about (see Blumhouse's 13 Sins for the potential of his craze). It's a waste here, the film replaying the same couple-in-danger sequences over and over again. For a solid hour, Jessabelle morphs into a horror-spun Nicholas Sparks movie, random demon attacks scattered between rowboat rides and rain storm meet cutes. It's two split personalities, playing nice like schizophrenia.
