Starring Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Rossif Sutherland, Tuppence Middleton, Sean Bean. Directed by Brandon Cronenberg.
It takes big guts to follow in your father’s footsteps. If your father has become famous for directing films that have been pivotal in creating a genre or a style, coming on to the scene and making a movie in the sandbox takes some big damn balls. Imagine Sofia Coppola making a gangster pic, or Jennifer Lynch going for out-and-out surrealism. Possessor is the second feature from writer-director Brandon Cronenberg, son of legendary filmmaker David. It’s been eight years since his debut film Antiviral, and six years since the last time a Cronenberg flick graced our screens.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos, an agent who works for a company that uses brain-implant technology to enter other people’s bodies, in order to make them commit assassinations. Her latest job: infiltrate a wealthy CEO’s inner circle by way of his daughter’s boyfriend.
When Cronenberg Sr. came on the scene with his body horror films, it was always more about the physical being a manifestation of the mental. After twenty years making body horror like The Fly, Videodrome and Scanners he moved on to more psychological movies like A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method. Cronenberg Jr. employs both the physical and the mental at the same time.
Here we have a world where identity can be hijacked in order to fulfil corporate greed. In a way, there’s a whiff of the Inception about it, but it’s a much more physical film. A tense prologue involves the brutal stabbing of a target in particularly gnarly fashion. Afterwards, the film quickly falls into scene after scene of nasty blood poking and gross moments of spurting fluids.
Cronenberg and cinematographer Karim Hussain have a fantastic eye for colour; an interrogation scene is dominated by reds, and pink in the bedroom, with white after a particularly nasty encounter. The editing similarly changes pace from slow and minimalist to filled with subliminal messages. It’s a rich film visually, and it underlines the ideas at its core.
Identity is the one thing we have a right to. Despite this, mankind fears the loss of identity more than most other things, which is why so much horror is based on the loss of it. Cronenberg calls upon this fear with the idea that when you return from inside someone else’s head you have to do a memory test. The memory is tactile, filled with objects from your past with a few that aren’t, and you must recognise and explain various things. It’s a brilliant way of setting up that the physical and the mental are connected.
It’s also helped by two fantastic turns from Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott. Riseborough has quietly worked for the past decade at becoming the go-to character actress, doing both TV and film, Hollywood and British, all without getting the kudos she deserves. Here, she’s almost transparently pale, with the sort of white hair and dead eyes that would make Tilda Swinton proud. Her performance is isolated, and brilliantly removed, all the time calling to mind a junkie relapsing into an addiction. Alongside her is Christopher Abbott as the mark that she infiltrates. In a way he gets the harder role, playing someone who is playing someone else. It’s a testament to his skill as an actor that it feels like one fluid performance between two people.
In the end, the film’s biggest flaw is in fact one of its more unique qualities: it feels very isolated and removed. While that might well be the point, it has little to cling to in terms of character, and with thumb sketches it’s hard to invest too much in the plot, which also doesn’t have much weight; it’s more the skeleton on which to hang the flesh of ideas.
Even so, it’s a gory, sometimes weird experience that is as assured in its ideas as it is in its direction, and proves that sometimes you can inherit talent, even if it’s a talent for the weird and the macabre.
