Review by Jessica Carr
Have you ever had an idea plant into your brain and you don’t know where it came from, but you can’t stop thinking about it? And that idea latches on like a parasite, feeding on your every waking moment? Ideas can be dangerous, especially if they are being planted by people with nefarious purposes. Brandon Cronenberg’s latest Sci-fi horror film, Possessor, presents a world where in which corporations have this power – they use technology to create elite assassins for hire, killing high profile targets. It seems far-fetched for such technology to exist and for it to be legal for corporations to choose any person to take over, but if you really dig into the metaphor here and think about how we are constantly being bombarded with advertising designed via data harvesting, then you might realize corporations are already trying to implant ideas into our brains. With Possessor, Cronenberg expands this scenario to encompass a variety of ailments that seem to be plaguing working-class people every day.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), an elite corporate assassin. She is known for her efficiency in the field using brain-implant technology to take over a host body and terminate the assigned target. Her boss (Jennifer Jason Leigh) praises her efficiency and always ensures Vos is mentally capable of the job ahead of her. After one of Vos’s missions, it is brought up that she uses a knife to violently kill the target instead of using the gun they gave her to kill them quickly. We also see Vos, in the host body, stab the target repeatedly, as if she is taking some enjoyment from the act of violence. It’s a concerning sight that starts to paint a picture for the viewer: perhaps Vos is being consumed by her job, but maybe there is a part of her that likes it. When she goes to spend time with her husband and her son, she doesn’t seem herself. She is, quite frankly, a shell of a human being. She tries to rehearse what to say to her husband and son when she visits them, and even smells her son’s hair in an attempt to trigger some sort of emotional response. Soon, Vos is assigned her highest-profile job yet – to kill the CEO of another big-tech corporation. Her host body is the CEO’s daughter’s boyfriend Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott). Colin used to be the daughter’s drug dealer, but when they started dating she got him a job at the company. When Vos takes over Colin’s body, she quickly realizes he isn’t going to submit without a fight.
The film doesn’t hold back any punches when it comes to violence. In interviews, Cronenberg said he wanted the violence to be as viscerally disturbing as possible. Knives go into throats, bullets go into faces, and (in a scene so explicit I had to cover my eyes) a fire poker pops out an eyeball. I watched the “uncut” version of the film as it was released by Neon and I can confirm this film likely would have recieved an NC-17 rating if it was rated at all. However, the violence has its purpose. We are supposed to see how inhuman Vos has truly become; she has become so immersed in her job that she is actually starting to take some sort of sick pleasure in it, dipping her fingers in the blood of her victims and taking her time to complete the killings. This character development reminded me of the fascist megacop at the center of Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. Both characters’ arcs are meant to show that they have been completely consumed by their jobs and every attempt to redeem them as an empathetic human being is shut down by the end of the film.
The visuals in Possessor are extremely ambitious and inventive. Cronenberg was inspired by science videos he had seen online for a lot of the film’s experimental scenes. He shows a stream of water that appears to defy gravity, an effect that was captured in-camera using a subwoofer placed inside a fountain that generated a tone at a frequency of 24 Hz, matching the frame rate of the camera. In one scene, in which it appears Vos is melting into Colin, they used heat to melt wax figures to get the desired effect. One of the most terrifying props in the film is perhaps the prosthetic mask that resembles a contorted and stretched out version of Vos’s face. Truly Cronenberg learned some of these tricks from his father’s work in body horror, but he is also attempting to do his own thing with the genre, which I really admire.
With its amazing visuals and effective storytelling, I think Possessor is able to create a riveting cinematic experience. It isn’t a comfortable one by any means, but it’s definitely something you feel viscerally, alternating between brutal violence and quiet, methodical sequences. In creating such an extreme experience, Cronenberg implants an idea of his own: if we allow corporations to plant their ideas into our heads and let it change us as human beings, then we are all destined to become walking lifeless shells.