Possessor (2020)
dir. Brandon Cronenberg
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Neon
There are two bravura sequences in director Brandon Cronenberg’s waking nightmare of a film, Possessor. Brandon, the son of legendary horror director David Cronenberg, proves with Possessor, his second feature after 2012’s Antiviral, that he’s up to taking on the family business: creating mind-bending cinema centered around queasy body-horror special effects.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos, a contract killer who works for a company with a revolutionary process for carrying out its assignments. Vos is a possessor; using the company’s technology, her consciousness is implanted in a host body to do the killing. After each hit, Vos is pulled out of the host body, leaving that poor soul to deal with the consequences of a murder that he or she had no choice in committing.
In the first act, Vos’s handler and boss, a woman named Girder, tells Vos about her next assignment. It’s the biggest contract in the firm’s history; part of the compensation is shares in a Google-like tech company that specializes in training artificial intelligence algorithms how to be more useful.
The son of John Parse, the tech company’s founder, has hired Girder’s firm to kill both his father and his sister, Ava, so that he inherits everything. Girder instructs Vos that her host body will be Colin Tate, Ava’s boyfriend. Tate works for Ava’s father in a menial-level job, teaching the A.I. how to identify objects in webcam video by describing those objects.
John Parse is a cruel man who enjoys putting Ava’s boyfriends through this sadistic power flexing. As Tate, Vos will stage getting drunk at a party that Parse is throwing, pick a fight with the mogul so that Tate gets thrown out, then return after the party to commit the murders.
Things become complicated for Vos when Tate struggles with her for control of his own body.
Through this setup, Cronenberg, who also wrote the screenplay for Possessor, explores myriad themes, including gender identity, the psychological effect of looking into a mirror and not seeing yourself, and even how technology is making it easier for people to take on personas and personalities other than their own. The sci-fi premise of the picture – implanting one person’s consciousness into the body of someone else – is pure fantasy (for now, at least), but that’s essentially what millions of people do by using the anonymity of the internet.
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about the transgender politics of Possessor. Brandon, like his father did in horror classics like Videodrome and his remake of The Fly, specializes in displaying really terrible things happening to the human body. In Possessor, one of those things is the horror (at least, that’s how I read the movie’s point-of-view) of a woman being inside of a man’s body.
Politically regressive or not – and inarguably transgressive – one magnificently realized sequence gives a visual representation of Vos’s state of mind. She is having sex with Ava, using Tate’s body. The camera slowly tracks along Vos’s body (as, I’m assuming, she sees herself). We see her face, then her breasts, and then below the waist, we see a fully erect penis. It’s a startling image, and the only argument I can make against it being a transphobic statement is that Vos is not, so far as we know, a transgender person. This disconnect in who she is and how she sees herself both inside and outside of this host body would be psychologically disorienting to anyone.
Cronenberg, his cinematographer, Karim Hussain, and his editor, Matthew Hannam, use avant-garde, disorienting techniques throughout Possessor to keep us off balance. The two hypnotic (and disturbing) sequences I mentioned in the first sentence are the best examples of this. The first is a visual representation of the melding process when Vos’s consciousness invades Tate’s body. It’s a stop-motion effects sequence that shows Vos’s body – a stand in for her ego – melting away and reconstituting as Tate. The effect looks like a wax figure slowly disintegrating from too much heat. It has a tactile feel that’s hard to overstate.
The second mind-bending moment is pure horror. It takes place within the characters’ subconscious. In the struggle between Tate and Vos for control over Tate’s body, Vos’s face becomes an exaggerated, dreadful mask, which is grotesquely melted. Tate takes this mask and puts it on his face in a desperate attempt to maintain control. When mixed with the lens flares, smeary lighting effects, and disorienting out-of-focus camera work, Possessor becomes an intoxicating fever-dream.
When it comes to violence, gratuitousness is in the eye of the beholder. For me, the extreme violence in Possessor does become gratuitous. The graphic stabbings (particularly in the jugular), shootings, and one unforgettable scene involving a fireplace poker – which, beyond reasonable belief, the victim survives – serve absolutely no purpose other than to shock and sicken. But, if that’s your kink – as it clearly is in the Cronenberg family – you won’t be disappointed.
The cast of the film adds to its strange aesthetic. Andrea Riseborough has an androgynous quality on par with David Bowie in top (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane) form. I first came to know Riseborough through her otherworldly performance as the title character in the bonkers 2018 release, Mandy. Christopher Abbott is a tabula rasa as Colin Tate. His lack of character seems frustrating at first, but Abbott’s performance is of a piece with how his character is exploited throughout Possessor.
Jennifer Jason Leigh makes the most of her handful of scenes as Girder, Vos’s world-weary boss. Sean Bean is a complete bastard as tech tycoon John Parse. Tuppence Middleton – who played Riley in my beloved Sense8 – isn’t given much to do here as Tate’s girlfriend, Ava, but she makes the most of it.
What makes Possessor work is the psychological questions it makes you ponder while you’re watching it. The straight horror elements of the movie may have been gratuitous, but I’d be lying if I said they didn’t also hold me in a kind of sick fascination. As a mind-bending work of imaginative and disturbing science-fiction, you’d be hard pressed to find anything this year more effective than Possessor.
Why it got 4 stars:
Possessor will definitely NOT be to everyone’s taste, but if you can handle the horrific, graphic violence, it holds some really thought-provoking ideas. Brandon Cronenberg has a mastery over visual style and harrowing storytelling.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- One huge reservation: The assassination we see at the very beginning of the film, the one that acquaints us with how this system works, involves a Black woman as the victim of Vos’s body-snatching. When Vos is out, cops show up, and shoot the woman point blank. After she is down, and obviously mortally wounded, the cop shoots her again in the face. In this sequence, which he plays up for the horror, Cronenberg comes across as tone-deaf, at best, about the plight of Black people being indiscriminately killed by cops. He’s not making a social statement, because the movie spends zero time on it after the woman is killed.
- There is a really cool sequence that follows Vos coming out of each job. She is shown artifacts from her own life by Girder, and asked to explain their significance as a way to make sure Vos is mentally whole after each assignment. Cronenberg handles these sequences well.
- He is also adept at doling out just enough information about the sci-fi premise without bludgeoning us with exposition, Christopher Nolan style, and leaving just enough to our imagination to let it run wild.
- This must have been such a challenging, fun experience for Christopher Abbott. He had to be a character within a character for almost the whole film.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Watched on a screener disc from Neon. Possessor is available to rent or buy on most digital platforms.