Review: Don’t Lose Yourself to the ‘Possessor’
“You’re turning strange on me.”
You know of David Cronenberg, the prolific horror director who forged some of the most visually frightening nightmares ever put to screen. The Fly. Videodrome. Crash. Dead Ringers. Scanners. Mere utterance of those films will have film theorists and genre fans alike crawling from the woodwork to discuss his patently graphic ‘Cronenberg Body Horror’ that’s become a cinema mainstay. He’s a godfather of the horror genre and the real life father to Brandon Cronenberg, the young gun at the helm of our film for discussion: Possessor.
Since its Sundance debut earlier this year, word on the street is that Possessor is a gory nightmare of psychological unease with visual stimuli that is right in line with the Cronenberg name. And after seeing it, they have a point. While it would be unwise to color Brandon’s work wholly in the shadow of his father, it is indeed a sci-fi horror narrative that leverages gruesome deaths and bodily configurations as a way to coax out our inner-most fears. However, in spite of the familial similarities between their work, the hook with Possessor is that it’s quite good at doing those things.
In the not so distant future, assassinations take place through proxies. A black market corporation has developed a brain implant that lets ‘possessors’ assume control of an unsuspecting vessel and kill their intended target without ever getting their actual hands dirty. All they have to do is kill their host on the way out and they’re in the clear. Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is one of those possessors, and for her, killing people is just another day at the office.
As the star performer, she has a reputation for high marks, but from the opening scene, you can tell her repeat offenses have started to take their toll. After all, one can only kill and be killed so many times. But there’s a big job on the horizon, a job too big to pass up, let alone be handed to the inexperienced: killing the CEO of a massive data company (Sean Bean) by way of their son-in-law (Christopher Abbott). With her job in front of her and her demons at her back, Vos assumes the role of the possessor one more time, but this time, it might cost her.
Cryptic not only in backstory, but also thematic explanation, Possessor gates most of its information within the window of its narrative. Vos’ previous trauma is never explicitly stated, though, killing people for a living might be a good place to start looking. With each contract she carries out, an exit test must be performed that checks her ability to perceive reality and retain memory. Turns out transplanting your conscious into the body of another human to kill can take its toll, and too much exposure to the process can cause out of body experiences where visual distortions appear and the mind starts to drift into the ether (raise your hand if you’ve been there).
For her test, a pipe from her grandfather kicks off the assessment, followed by a decoy bracelet thrown in to keep her on her toes, but it’s a taxidermy butterfly that gives her pause. Plucked from nature when she was a child for display in a riker case, Vos notes, “I still feel guilty about [killing it].” And ladies and gentlemen, we have found our thread that Possessor sews itself on.
Contract after contract, hit after hit, Vos continues to find momentary solace in others, doing whatever she can to be somewhere and someone else. Whether it be some unspoken trauma in her past or the repeated damage she inflicts on herself via her occupation, assuming another person’s identity allows her to suppress the guilt that follows her, outrunning it before it comes back more vengeful than ever.
In between assignments, you can see those demons catching up. She visits her near-estranged husband and son for a few days, but before she can do so, she has to practice putting on a face, reciting basic greetings and conversation starters to enable basic human interaction. Family time with her son brings small joys, dinner parties with friends prove burdensome and irritating, and intimacy with her husband is without sensation. There is no pleasure in real life for her, so it’s not long before the compulsion to morph into someone else takes hold.
Brandon Cronenberg presents the idea of a possessor as someone in constant battle with their identity. Who the “true" self really is becomes the film’s central question when the body Vos assumes control of starts to fight back. Periodic moments of crisis are told with distorted audio and warped visuals that make for moments of horrifying abstraction, but can often veer into oblique confusion. The exact messaging of one person fighting to flee themself while the other is trying to resume control can be a battle ground for psychological conflict, so you’re best left to infer meaning from the chaos where you can find it. Just don’t lose yourself to the possessor in the process.
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