100 Candles Game: The Last Possession (2023) Review

100 Candles Game: The Last Possession (2023) Review

In this horror anthology, timeless ghost stories are brought into the digital age, delivering a fear-filled night of terror for a group of influencers, desperate for daring content to captivate their followers and grow their fan-base…

The band of bloggers make it their mission to spend a night at the chilling Stonewall Mansion, a place shrouded in mystery and tales of terror, where they hold the ancient Japanese ritual “100 Candles”.

Encircled by the flicker of a hundred flames, the group takes turns to share terrifying ghost stories, unaware that their actions are about to evoke the spirit of the Black Countess and let otherworldly forces into this world.

As each tale unfolds, the bloggers find themselves trapped in a nightmarish game, where the only way to survive is to bring back the demons they’ve unleashed and continue the game until the last candle burns out. 

I was pleasantly surprised by the original anthology THE 100 CANDLES GAME from 2020, given that by-and-large, I am not a fan of the genre, and this sequel anthology started off promisingly with a well-produced segment showing a demonic looking woman chained up in a dungeon, dry retching and causing a book to move without handling it across the floor.

We abruptly to switch to what looks like a found-footage segment where four social influencers set up base at the ominous looking Stonewall Mansion to play the titular game. Quite how all four managed to carry not only a hundred chunky candles with them to the woodland-based location but also a not small number of other candles for lighting up other parts of the location does not make any sense, they just couldn’t, but anyway for plot purposes they have, and this is where the anthology’s proper wraparound story begins. So far, so disjointed!

This indie horror has many short stories within its noticeably short running time of 73 minutes, and it all feels too much. There’s never time to engage properly with one short story before its finished and we’re on to the next one. There’s no rhyme or reason to their inclusion and consequently the anthology does not flow as it should do, it jars, constantly at odds with itself.

There are moments that stand-out, the zombie-heavy short FIVE MINUTES by Maximilian Neimann headed up by the handsome lead Kiernan Bew is fast, frenetic and a very welcome change of pace. But then there are others such as LET HER GO, which follows on from FIVE MINUTES, that is overlong and predictable throughout.

100 Candles Game: The Last Possession Trailer

Credit: 100 Candles Game: The Last Possession on digital 13 January from 101 Films