Possessor | Little White Lies

Pos­ses­sor

23 Nov 2020 / Released: 27 Nov 2020

Person wearing dark goggles in a dimly lit environment.
Person wearing dark goggles in a dimly lit environment.
4

Anticipation.

Cronenberg Jr’s brutal style combined with such an exemplary cast is bound to be fun.

4

Enjoyment.

Not sure that I’d call this fun but I can’t look away.

4

In Retrospect.

A beautiful nightmare that it’s hard to wake up from.

Bran­don Cro­nen­berg fol­lows up his impres­sive debut Antivi­ral with a vis­cer­al slice of hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry ultraviolence.

It has been eight years since the release of Bran­don Cronenberg’s debut fea­ture, Antivi­ral, an impres­sive­ly nasty lit­tle satire about a future in which celebri­ty dis­eases become high­ly priced com­modi­ties. In the inter­ven­ing years, that film’s mad premise has come to seem less far-fetched than intend­ed. Society’s desire for close­ness with celebri­ty has only increased, and the recent pan­dem­ic has revealed the strange inti­ma­cy of viral transmission.

Cronenberg’s fol­low-up takes a step back from satire while going all-in on the nas­ti­ness. Pos­ses­sor is a gor­geous mind­fuck of a film that rev­els in night­mar­ish fan­tasies and lux­u­ri­ates in gore. Set in an alter­nate 2008, it is a sto­ry about bod­ies snatched, con­sumed and forced into being unwill­ing assas­sins, a premise that reminds us not only of Cro­nen­berg Sr, but Mamou­ru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, Christo­pher Nolan’s Incep­tion and Philip K Dick’s A Scan­ner Darkly’.

The film sets its grue­some tone imme­di­ate­ly, as a young woman (Gabrielle Gra­ham) slow­ly injects a fine cable direct­ly into her bleed­ing scalp. Dis­guised as a wait­ress, she enters an ele­gant par­ty and locates her tar­get. She stabs him again and again and again as gey­sers of hot crim­son blood erupt onto her clothes and face. It is as repul­sive as it is fas­ci­nat­ing and, with that, Cro­nen­berg has us hooked.

Andrea Rise­bor­ough plays Tasya Vos, a wife, moth­er and assas­sin, who implants her­self into the minds and hijacks the bod­ies of strangers to get close to her intend­ed tar­gets. Riseborough’s oth­er­world­ly inten­si­ty is per­fect­ly pitched here – she is unset­tling and some­how an imposter both in her real and pro­fes­sion­al lives. Mean­while, Christo­pher Abbott plays Col­in Tate, a cocaine deal­er who has land­ed on his feet by get­ting engaged to the daugh­ter of wealthy CEO John Parse (Sean Bean) who also hap­pens to be Vos’ next target.

Cronenberg’s film, filled with night­mar­ish hal­lu­ci­na­tions and intense vio­lence, is fas­ci­nat­ing and exhaust­ing to watch. When Vos takes over Tate’s body, the meld­ing of human tis­sue and tech­nol­o­gy plays out in abstract ways, with shots of melt­ing bod­ies and mis­placed faces being crushed and cast out of their own frames. Vos and Tate take on the role of dual invaders, each one a grotesque ghost in the machine. The task of por­tray­ing all this large­ly falls to Abbot, who com­ple­ments Riseborough’s unset­tling per­for­mance with some­thing small­er, tor­tured yet equal­ly compelling.

This is all fur­ther enhanced by the uncan­ny alter­na­tive world the pair inhab­it, sim­i­lar enough to com­pre­hend but with marked styl­is­tic and archi­tec­tur­al dif­fer­ences to give it a preter­nat­ur­al eeri­ness. Cro­nen­berg has a clear eye and ear for detail, with fur­ni­ture that resem­bles sev­ered spinal cords, and an echoey, tex­tured sound­track which proves as sin­is­ter as the scenes of extreme brutality.

The film bal­ances its vis­cer­al style with a cere­bral the­sis right up until its cli­mac­tic scenes. It is a night­mare that gets under your skin as its ques­tions of auton­o­my and iden­ti­ty linger just as long as the explo­sions of spec­tac­u­lar violence.

Pos­ses­sor is avail­able on dig­i­tal plat­forms from 27 November.

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