THE HORRIFYING HISTORY of British slavery in the Caribbean is ripe for continued exploration on screen, and in the new Sky series Possession the story of one plantation is given a supernatural thriller twist.  

At the story’s centre is British-Jamaican lawyer Claudia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is tasked with uncovering why her client Oliver Connaught (Jonny Lee Miller) has been replaced on his father’s will by an unknown Jamaican man Cudjoe East (Sheldon Shepherd).

Connaught’s family owned Hope Hill House, a plantation where many slaves were kept and mistreated. But who is Cudjoe East, and why is he replacing the presumed heir to the property?

Claudia – played by Mbatha-Raw as uptight and reserved, wide-eyed and cynical, but easily rattled – heads to Jamaica with Oliver – sympathetically played by Miller as a man aware of his family’s dark legacy – to find Cudjoe. They want to discover who he is, but also find a way to prove his appearance on the will is due to fraud. 

Hope Hill

When Claudia arrives in Jamaica, she heads straight to Hope Hill, driven there by local man Angelo (Jeff Crossley), who is antsy and occasionally abrasive.

Claudia notices a symbol hanging in Angelo’s car which she will see later that night at Hope Hill, when she pulls up the floorboards to reveal a dusty trunk (never a good idea, eh?). The audience knows this trunk has a connection to enslaved people living at Hope Hill hundreds of years previously, thanks to a flashback that opens the series. When a ghostly cloud of dust swirls out of the trunk, it seems that some sort of force has been unleashed into Hope Hill. But it already contains many dark secrets of its own.

Alfred Connaught (Jonny Lee Miller) Des Willie (unit Photogrpaher) Des Willie (unit Photogrpaher)

When Angelo discovers Claudia has opened the trunk, he spits liquid in her face, engendering distrust in Claudia and setting up Angelo as an antagonist. But Angelo’s appearance in the series isn’t for long, and in fact it’s a whole host of other forces and people that haunt Claudia in her dreams and in person. 

Further flashbacks to the 18th century help to deepen the story of Hope Hill, filling us in on how its slaves were treated and the supernatural forces that were embedded there. We meet Matthew Desfreisne (also Sheldon Shepherd), a slave with a family connection to the home; Charlotte Connaughton (Bel Powley), who becomes the home’s owner; and a selection of other characters who keep the status quo at the home intact.

The twin timelines serve to build a picture of Hope Hill’s role in slavery, and ask whether it’s possible for a family to ever atone for their role in what occurred during this period of history.  

Dehumanisation

The series doesn’t shy away from the horrors of slavery, and its inherent dehumanisation and violence. A scene involving a particularly horrific form of ‘punishment’ meted out on an enslaved woman is juxtaposed via a quick cut with a white family playing merrily in a pool.

Angelo Des Willie (unit Photogrpaher) Des Willie (unit Photogrpaher)

The series never loses sight of the long-tail impact of trauma, either – both in terms of Hope Hill’s slaves, but also in how Claudia deals with the loss of her mother. Her own lack of connection to her Jamaican heritage is perhaps not unusual, given she was raised by a white father. But she does have a sometimes baffling lack of knowledge about the history of slavery and reparations.

Possession – as the name suggests – dwells mostly in the realm of the unreal, with jump scares and visual shocks like swarms of mosquitos and doors slamming on fingers. In Hope Hill, phones don’t always work, radios are disrupted and there’s a constant sense of it being a haunted house. 

In its gothic depiction of slavery and its aftermath, Possession never leaves us doubting how much harm was done. The audience can’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction during the scenes when aristocratic slave owners or their descendants are punished in strange ways for what occurred. 

But while this story is a newish angle on the slavery story (perhaps taking some cues from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, or Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea), it isn’t always successful at executing what it sets out to achieve.

The delivery and execution at times can verge on horror film cliché, without being truly frightening. Claudia has been having dreams about a spooky house, and – you guessed it – when she arrives at Hope Hill she realises this is the place she’s been dreaming about. Key characters can verge on one-note, like Cudjoe East, who has a very surprising origin story but doesn’t always feel fully rounded.

But the series and its creator Karla Crome must nonetheless be applauded for tackling a topic that deserves this sort of attention, and in giving the stories of enslaved people as much of a focus as those who enslaved them. If you’re looking for a series that melds supernatural horror with historical fact, then you might find Possession a thought-provoking and unsettling watch. 

Possession is streaming on NOW.