Caroline does not need a demon to hate her mother. Her anger is already waiting for one. That distinction gives The Containment its most promising emotional idea. Jules is trying to keep two children together after her quadriplegic husband dies by suicide, while Caroline still blames her for the earlier car accident that left him disabled. Her younger brother Don has responded differently, retreating into silence since his father’s death. Before anything supernatural happens, this family has already stopped communicating in every meaningful sense.
Directors Jack Zagha Kababie and Yossy Zagha, working from a screenplay written with David Desola, could have made that fracture the engine of the horror. Instead, the film soon sends a scarab-like beetle crawling into Caroline’s mouth while she sleeps. From there, grief gradually loses ground to possession convention.
The scarab itself works. Seeing Caroline sense it beneath her skin creates a tactile disgust that the film rarely matches once the demon begins behaving like demons in movies usually do. The beetle feels invasive in a personal way. Black eyes and levitation feel inherited.
A Demon We Have Met Before
Once Caroline begins changing, The Containment moves through familiar checkpoints with surprising obedience. The family cat turns up dead. May finds Caroline standing in the road during a nocturnal episode. Medical examinations reveal nothing.
Caroline experiences violent contortions, altered voices, vomiting and moments where something else seems to control her body. Gia Hunter throws herself into those physical sequences, twisting Caroline from frightened teenager into an aggressive presence in seconds.
There is a funny flash of self-awareness when Caroline tells Marnie that she may be possessed and her friend dismisses the idea by invoking the usual horror-movie signs. The joke briefly suggests a film prepared to acknowledge the enormous shadow cast by The Exorcist. Then the story keeps reproducing much of the same vocabulary.
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The difficulty is rhythm. Horror this familiar needs escalation with almost mathematical precision. A strange behavior should make the next one feel worse. Here, scenes frequently stretch through slow, plainly spoken conversations until the previous scare has evaporated.
Professor Desmond should provide a useful disruption. Caroline summons the YouTube demonology expert, whose confidence collapses once the entity violently demonstrates that internet expertise has its limits. It is a good setup because modern supernatural horror rarely knows what to do with the fact that anyone can search for demons online. The film gets a dark joke from it, then moves along.
The People Behind the Possession
The scenes that linger are often the ones where nobody is floating. Charlotte Hunter’s Jules has to process a brutal combination of guilt, grief and parental exhaustion. Caroline is not simply frightened by her condition. She is furious at the person trying to save her.
That should make every supernatural incident hurt twice, since the demon can weaponize resentment that existed before it arrived. The screenplay rarely lets that happen. Caroline remains hostile, Jules remains overwhelmed and Don remains silent for long stretches. Their emotional positions are established clearly, then held in place.
May offers another route the story barely explores. Her closeness with Jules hints at an intimacy developing while the household is collapsing. Instead of examining what companionship might mean to a woman mourning her husband while raising two traumatized children, the film leaves the relationship suspended.
Don suffers most from this approach. A child who stops speaking after his father’s death creates an immediate question about trauma, knowledge and fear. Gabriel Bonilla’s silence gives Don an eerie presence, particularly because Caroline’s possession turns everyone else’s attention outward toward the supernatural. Yet the boy spends much of the film waiting for the story to remember him. That is where The Containment becomes frustrating rather than simply predictable. Its best emotional material is sitting in the same rooms as the demon.
The Nun, the Scarab and the Twist
The religious side becomes stranger once Father Robert refuses to conduct an exorcism. His illness and the Church’s reluctance leave Sister Esperanza to step into a role possession films usually reserve for an authoritative priest.
Fernanda Romero plays her with restraint. There is no towering clerical confidence here. Esperanza feels underprepared, which changes the emotional texture of the exorcism. Jules, Caroline, May and Esperanza are the people actively confronting the crisis while the film’s male figures are absent, incapacitated or ineffective. That arrangement gives the familiar ritual a different vulnerability.
The cinematography occasionally helps. Caroline emerging from the gloom or the scarab appearing against skin can produce the nasty sensation that something is present before anyone has properly seen it. Other scenes are lit so dimly that atmosphere begins competing with legibility. Then the film finally risks something.
The entity suggests that it has been protecting Caroline. Suddenly, possession stops being a simple invasion. The demon may be a restraint, a container for something already inside her. That possibility changes the emotional meaning of Caroline’s earlier cruelty, her anger toward Jules and the violence surrounding her. For a brief stretch, the film becomes harder to predict. The final sting works because it asks us to reconsider which presence we should have feared all along. I only wish The Containment had trusted that question sooner.
The Containment premiered in theaters and on digital platforms through Level 33 Entertainment on January 23, 2026. Following the tragic death of her father, a troubled teenage girl becomes possessed by a dark and sinister entity, prompting the church to intervene.
Where to Watch The Containment (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: The Containment
Distributor: Level 33 Entertainment
Release date: January 23, 2026
Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes
Director: Jack Zagha Kababie, Yossy Zagha
Writers: David Desola, Jack Zagha Kababie, Yossy Zagha
Producers and Executive Producers: Jack Zagha Kababie, Yossy Zagha
Cast: Gia Hunter, Jack Gouldbourne, Charlotte Hunter, Fernanda Romero, Isabel Aerenlund, Roger Cudney, Alice Coulthard
The Review
The Containment
The Containment finds its strongest pulse in the scarab imagery and the late suggestion that Caroline’s demon may be protecting her from something worse. Until then, the film rarely escapes possession-horror muscle memory. Gia Hunter’s contortions, Sister Esperanza’s improvised intervention, and Caroline’s nocturnal episodes create brief unease, yet slow dialogue and familiar manifestations keep draining it away. That final turn leaves a sharper emotional bruise than the preceding exorcism, arriving after the film has already spent too long feeling borrowed.
PROS
- Creepy scarab imagery
- Disturbing final revelation
- Effective physical possession scenes
- Interesting female-led exorcism setup
CONS
- Familiar possession formula
- Sluggish dialogue
- Underdeveloped family relationships
- Limited character progression
- Uneven tension
