★★★1/2

A horror film made by folks who have built careers on holiday and romance movies for The Hallmark Channel is everything I never knew I needed in this messed up year of 2020. About as far removed from those saccharine sweet TV movies as one can get, Anything for Jackson flips the premise of exorcism films upside down and offers a clever and creepy tale of two distraught individuals making a whole lot of bad decisions.

The opening scene finds an older couple having breakfast and making small talk. Finishing up, Henry (Julian Richings) goes outside and strongarms a young pregnant woman (Konstantina Mantelos) into the house, with Audrey (Sheila McCarthy) rushing behind to help. The elderly couple’s suddenly sinister demeanor and actions are soon explained.

After losing their daughter and two-year-old grandson to a car accident, the grieving grandparents have concocted a seemingly foolproof plan: Conduct a thousand-year-old Satanic ritual that will summon the spirit of their late grandson into the body of the young woman’s unborn child. Basically, a reverse exorcism. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, lots of things. And as director Justin G. Dyck moves through the grandparents’ home, the almost exclusive setting of the film, we never quite know what spirit or ghost they have unwittingly brought into their home. The terrific production design offers a creepy landscape for the supernatural arrivals to play, and while the logic doesn’t quite hold as to what the particular rules happen to be around how and why they always appear, Dyck and screenwriter Keith Cooper (with more than a few of those Christmas Hallmark-style movies on his IMDb page as well) find a way to keep us on edge, playing on the tension and unpredictability of what may come next.

At times, Anything for Jackson struggles to shift between mood and tone, but overall - this is a nifty little chiller. The idea of love and loss is taken to the extreme, and even if the arrival of an overzealous Satanist (Josh Cruddas) overwhelms much of the film’s final act, the comedic undertones and dramatic tension, and elements of horror (one ghost in particular is close to nightmare fuel) blend together for an entertaining and enjoyable ride.

Anything for Jackson makes its U.S. Premiere at Nightstream 2020.