Bran­don Cronenberg’s mind-jel­ly­ing Pos­ses­sor has got­ten a first trailer

As we have all been reex­am­in­ing the frailty of our meaty human bod­ies in light of the recent glob­al pan­dem­ic, day-to-day life has tak­en on a rather Cro­nen­ber­gian tinge. That need not refer to David, mind you, at least not for long; his son Bran­don has made a name for him­self as a film­mak­er in his own right, chart­ing out a new fron­tier of psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly thorny body hor­ror unlike any other.

The trail­er for Pos­ses­sor sur­faced online today, teas­ing view­ers with a vision of grotes­querie and psy­che­delia prob­ing the deep­est recess­es of the mind. Or at least, that’s a fair guess — the clip doesn’t give away much in the way of a premise or plot, pre­fer­ring instead to rapid-fire dis­turb­ing images of dis­tend­ed flesh, futur­is­tic machin­ery, entwined bod­ies, what-have-you.

By revis­it­ing our own Han­nah Woodhead’s cov­er­age from Sun­dance ear­li­er this year, we may learn that Andrea Rise­bor­ough stars as an assas­sin work­ing for a shad­owy agency that uses ghoul­ish machin­ery to trans­plant one person’s con­scious­ness into an unwit­ting mark’s body for use in car­ry­ing out the hit. Hav­ing tak­en over the phys­i­cal form of Christo­pher Abbott (recent­ly of Pierc­ing and Vox Lux), she’s to mur­der his fam­i­ly and be on her way, but he won’t be pos­sessed so easily.

How that fills a fea­ture length will be anyone’s guess, but what’s cer­tain is that the inte­ri­or con­flict between these two char­ac­ters will have to dive into vivid abstrac­tion. The trail­er flash­es lurid col­ors sug­gest­ing an out­ré approach to the genre — the bloody red as Rise­bor­ough stretch­es a mask over her face, the icy blue of a pri­vate cham­ber as two fig­ures lock in coital embrace, the yel­low of a anti­sep­tic-look­ing stairwell.

US dis­trib­u­tor NEON has yet to set a date of release, though this does seem like the sort of title that would get a gang­busters recep­tion if rolled out to cap­tive audi­ences online dur­ing quar­an­tine. Cooped up alone in a dark house, grad­u­al­ly los­ing your grip on san­i­ty, feel­ing your body slip into its inevitable state of decay and base dys­func­tion — what bet­ter con­di­tions could there be for a movie like this?