Possession Review: Hope Hill Keeps Its Receipts

Fifty million pounds should make an inheritance dispute complicated enough. Possession decides that the beneficiary being nearly 300 years old is simply good case management. Karla Crome’s five-part drama sends Bristol solicitor Claudia McKenzie to Jamaica after wealthy client Alfred Connaught leaves his fortune and Hope Hill estate to Cudjoe East, a man his son Oliver claims never to have heard of.

Claudia’s firm expects her to find fraud, coercion or some other legal mechanism capable of returning the property to Oliver. Her boss also thinks sending the company’s mixed-race lawyer will improve the “optics.” Claudia responds by demanding partnership.

That exchange establishes Claudia efficiently. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays her as someone who knows exactly how her workplace sees her and has learned to turn its compromises into leverage. The complication is personal. Claudia’s mother was Jamaican, died when Claudia was born, and left her daughter with little connection to the country now being treated by her employer as a convenient piece of her résumé.

The legal setup is clean because it gives the supernatural story something firm to violate. Claudia arrives believing documents, witnesses and medical reports will explain Alfred’s decision. Hope Hill has kept a different filing system.

A House Full of Evidence

Storm Saulter introduces Jamaica through activity before letting Hope Hill swallow the story. Angelo, Alfred’s former driver, collects Claudia and takes her to the estate during Alfred’s Nine Night. People fill the grounds while Claudia remains slightly outside the ritual, watching rather than participating. Angelo’s protective charm registers with her mostly as local superstition. Then she finds the same symbol beneath the floorboards.

Claudia discovers a concealed trunk and opens it after being given every possible sign that opening concealed trunks in plantation houses is poor professional practice. Something seems to escape. Angelo reacts with panic, spraying liquid into Claudia’s face and later warning her to return to England. By the time Claudia finds him hanging dead, her neat fraud investigation has acquired a problem no solicitor’s checklist covers.

The haunted-house machinery becomes increasingly familiar from there. Radios fail. Phones stop cooperating. Doors develop personalities. Mosquitos arrive in unnatural numbers. Claudia’s dreams begin supplying images that later appear inside Hope Hill. Oliver eventually receives the less subtle treatment, including being thrown around by an unseen force.

This is where the series’ construction wobbles. Crome and Saulter are far better at creating unease through context than through escalation. Claudia finding the trunk works because the object has history before she understands it. Angelo’s death works because his warnings suddenly acquire weight.

Oliver being physically battered by the supernatural pushes the show toward a type of horror that requires sharper control of timing and visual restraint. Some of those sequences land closer to spectacle than terror. The ghosts rarely provide the worst thing in the room anyway.

Hope Hill Before the Haunting

The historical timeline gives Possession its strongest structural device. Episodes move between Claudia’s investigation and Hope Hill during slavery, gradually converting objects, names and ownership records from mystery clues into evidence of violence.

Sheldon Shepherd plays Matthew, the illegitimate son of plantation owner Eugene Desfrienes and an enslaved woman. His biological connection to Eugene does little to protect him from the racial hierarchy governing the estate. Eugene’s promise that Matthew will receive freedom and property offers the historical plot a clear dramatic spine. The promise matters because the modern inheritance dispute repeats its shape three centuries later.

Bel Powley’s Charlotte, Eugene’s legitimate daughter and Matthew’s half-sister, becomes the person determined to stop that promise from changing Hope Hill’s order. Her hostility is expressed through specific acts of control rather than abstract villainy. She resents Matthew’s claim on their father, polices the plantation’s racial hierarchy and participates in the cruelty inflicted on enslaved people.

One of the series’ most effective edits cuts away from a brutal punishment imposed on an enslaved woman to white people enjoying themselves in a pool. It is an aggressive transition, yet its point is exact. The pleasure and violence belong to the same economic structure. The second image cannot be separated from the first simply because the people inside it can afford not to look. Then Cudjoe East finally appears before Claudia.

He looks like Matthew because Shepherd plays both men, and he claims to have been born in the 18th century. It could have been the point where the story’s supernatural logic collapses under exposition. Instead, the casting gives the revelation immediate dramatic clarity. Claudia has spent her time looking for the missing connection between Alfred and Cudjoe. The connection is Hope Hill itself.

Cudjoe’s claim reframes Alfred’s £50 million bequest. What appeared to Oliver as an inexplicable decision begins to resemble an attempt to honour a promise that his family previously denied. The series does not reduce the matter to a tidy equation where one estate equals centuries of theft and suffering. Money can move between bank accounts much faster than responsibility moves between generations.

Claudia Changes Sides

Claudia begins the series on Oliver’s side for reasons that are almost aggressively practical. She has a client, a career opportunity and a plausible legal theory. She knows the Connaught fortune emerged from slavery, yet that knowledge initially sits apart from the work she has agreed to perform.

Mbatha-Raw makes the separation visible in her early scenes. Claudia remains controlled during conversations about Alfred’s will and treats Cudjoe as a legal obstacle before meeting him. When Oliver arrives in Jamaica, their alliance operates on a shared assumption: Cudjoe has obtained something that belongs to Oliver, so their task is to discover how he cheated. That assumption becomes harder to sustain once Claudia learns what Hope Hill meant to Matthew.

Her estranged aunt Mercy provides another pressure point. Nadean Rawlins brings a looser, sometimes funny energy to scenes that could easily become lectures on spirituality. Claudia initially regards Mercy’s practices with the same scepticism she applies to Angelo’s warnings. The distance fits a woman raised in Britain by her white father after losing her Jamaican mother at birth.

A trance-like encounter with the spirit world forces Claudia into contact with parts of her family history that legal research cannot reach. The supernatural works better here because it changes the protagonist rather than merely frightening her. Claudia’s relationship with Jamaica stops being biographical trivia her employer can exploit. It becomes part of the decision she has to make about Cudjoe.

Her eventual movement away from Oliver’s case and toward Cudjoe is the five episodes’ clearest arc. The writing occasionally makes the starting point too convenient. Claudia’s limited engagement with the history of slavery and reparations can feel artificially pronounced for an intelligent lawyer sent to investigate an estate built on a plantation. Mbatha-Raw smooths that problem through small adjustments in Claudia’s certainty. She does not suddenly become another person. She becomes less certain that the person who arrived was asking the right question.

Who Owns Hope Hill?

Pedro Cardillo’s photography keeps Jamaica from becoming a gloomy mansion surrounded by convenient palm trees. Saulter moves through Kingston traffic, crowded markets and public celebrations, then returns to the quieter landscape surrounding Hope Hill. A carnival sequence surges with bodies, music and movement, creating a Jamaica that exists independently of Claudia’s investigation.

That distinction matters. The story concerns British ownership of Jamaican land, so reducing the country to a haunted location would reproduce something uncomfortably close to the perspective it wants to question.

The use of Obeah-inspired spiritual traditions creates similar possibilities. Protective charms, Mercy’s spiritual work and the forces operating inside Hope Hill belong to a cultural history that British colonial authority once attempted to suppress. Claudia’s first instinct is to classify these practices as superstition. Her gradual acceptance of their reality runs beside her recognition that official records cannot be the sole authority on a history written by people who owned both the archive and the plantation.

Possession becomes less precise whenever it turns those ideas into standard horror grammar. The slamming doors and violent apparitions can seem oddly small beside Matthew’s story. Charlotte cutting across centuries through possession is conceptually rich, especially once Oliver becomes vulnerable to her presence, yet the physical manifestations sometimes state what the historical plot has already communicated with greater force.

Shepherd benefits from the reverse problem. Matthew receives specific relationships, betrayals and humiliations that define him dramatically. Cudjoe frequently has to carry centuries of history through pronouncements and sheer presence. Shepherd supplies the missing texture through his stillness and physical control, particularly opposite Claudia, where Cudjoe behaves less like a mysterious beneficiary pleading his case than someone tired of explaining why an old debt remains unpaid.

The title keeps shifting meaning around him. People were possessed as property at Hope Hill. Land is possessed through inheritance. Charlotte seeks possession of another body. Claudia’s firm tries to possess her identity for corporate advantage. Alfred attempts to alter possession through his will. The law can decide who receives Hope Hill. The unnerving part is how little that decision settles.

Possession is a supernatural thriller series that premiered on Sky Atlantic in 2026 and is available to stream on Sky and NOW. The story follows Claudia, an ambitious lawyer who travels to Jamaica to challenge an inheritance claim, only to discover the contested estate is a former plantation that has haunted her nightmares.

Full Credits

• Title: Possession

• Distributor: Sky Atlantic, Sky, NOW

• Release date: 2026

• Rating: 15 (Series), 18 (Episode 3)

• Running time: 60 minutes

• Director: Storm Saulter

• Writers: Karla Crome

• Producers and Executive Producers: Ruth Kenley-Letts, Jenny van der Lande, Neil Blair, Karla Crome, Storm Saulter, Sam Hoyle, Serena Thompson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jonny Lee Miller

• Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jonny Lee Miller, Sheldon Shepherd, Bel Powley, Nadean Rawlins, Sean Gilder, Olunike Adeliyi, Richard Dillane