‘Possessor’ puts gore to good use | movie review

One could try and sum up Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor — which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year — as an arthouse techno body horror version of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Though, that still doesn’t even begin to describe the diabolically visceral experience of watching the film.

Laced with some of the most horrific gore I’ve seen in a film in, well, ever, Possessor is a lot more than the bloody exploitation of its surface. Like his father, filmmaker legend David Cronenberg (The Fly, Videodrome), the younger Cronenberg uses the disturbing imagery to explore something more. Something deeply human—how our identity alternatively works for and against us.

In the prologue, we follow a woman we come to know as Holly (Gabrielle Graham). As she stares in the mirror, she plunges a needle attached to a device into her head. As she turns a dial, her emotions change from happy and laughing to crying to nothing. Later, she walks into a crowded restaurant, grabs a knife, and violently murders a man before her. She takes a gun that she brought and goes to turn it on herself. However a force prevents her from pulling the trigger. Instead, as the cops arrive, she turns the gun on them and is shot multiple times until she’s dead.

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Later we’ll learn that Holly wasn’t actually controlling her own body—it makes Graham’s short performance all the more impressive—and instead it was Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), a sort of assassin who uses brain-implant technology to inhabit a subjects body and use them to carry out hits for clients without anyone suspecting a thing.

Such is the case with her next job which involves inhabiting the body of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), to murder his girlfriend Ava (Tuppence Middleton) and her father John (Sean Bean), a billionaire and CEO of a large corporation, so that his stepson could take control of the business. Using Colin’s drug use and insecure masculinity as a cover for the crime.

Refreshingly, Possessor avoids much of the heavy exposition that a movie with as high a concept usually is bogged down by. Instead, Cronenberg only gives us enough information to understand while focusing more on story and character, which is wise considering there is so much to unpack.

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While we watch Tasya in Colin’s body go about setting up the crime, there is the subtext of her slow loss of grip on reality. Earlier we watch her go to visit her husband and son, however before going in she prepares rehearses what to say. Not because she’s nervous, but seemingly because she forgot how to be a person. Taking someone’s identity and committing increasing vile and gruesome murders will do that to a person.

Usually, that’d be an asset to someone with Tasya’s choice of career, however instead of helping her, it’s giving Colin an opening to take control back of his body. And that’s where Possessor becomes truly great. With sometimes stomach-churning gore, Cronenberg portrays the psychic warfare between Tasya and Colin as a neon-drenched assault on the senses that is as engrossing as it is disturbing to watch.

While Cronenberg doesn’t take full advantage of everything the world he’s concocted has to offer, he instead relied on its simplicity to dive into its complexities. Supported by understated but emotive cinematography by and Karim Hussain and engrossing score by Jim Williams, Possessor is nothing short of a test of will, but a test that is rewarding in the end. Because amid the carnage is something beautifully human.