Film review, Possessor. Body horror meets surveillance capitalism.
Possession has been a staple of the occult genre of films. Evil spirits possess a person to make them do dark acts. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) uses brainwashing to take control of someone making them conduct an assassination. In Brandon Cronenberg Possessor body horror, it is a case of going inside another person’s body, take control, move around, and kill. Set in a near future that is stylised on the nineteen seventies with production design from Rupert Lazarus. From the chairs they sit on to the operating theatre the body swaps take place it all contributes to an unsettling atmosphere. Nothing is overly explained, we grasp a shadowy corporation is in the assassination business with its innovative body swap technique allowing Andrea Riseborough’s character Tasya Vos to first learn the way Christopher Abbots Colin Tate speaks, moves, and makes love in preparation for the body swap. Her method to learn this is surveillance setting up the long lens camera to see him in his flat. The film warms us up to the central body swap assassination with a gruesome first kill. The terrible beauty of the technique is that you get to control a body that is in close proximity to your kill.
This being Brandon Cronenberg whose father is the great David Cronenberg this is not all sci-fi smooth. Andrea Riseborough brilliantly conveys the psychological challenges of beings inside someone else’s skin. Once inside another body should you start thinking thoughts from your own life and not your hosts this is viscerally conveyed in the film. The special effects are closer to Brian Yuza’s Society rather than using CGI the film uses prosthetics. This decision lends the film its shock value seeing how painful transitioning to another body can be. Christopher Abbot has the demanding task of playing the character Colin Tate while channelling Riseboroughs Tasya Vos who is the real assassin. His body is but the arena were Colin and Tasya battle for control. Sometimes Tates thoughts soak in and at other times Tasya’s memories of her family life flood in. This is visually represented with very trippy visuals.
Tate is boyfriend to Ava Parse whose father played with slimy evil by Sean Bean is John Parse who runs a company that looks into people rooms. In a nod to Videodrome (1983) staff sat at screens observe people’s homes noting the fabric of their bedsheets. This is surveillance capitalism with a seventies conspiratorial flavour. What I liked so much about this film is the atmosphere conjured up. The outdoors is brutalist and cold. The indoors are at odd angles, strange chairs, and the colour red is splashed around with great delight by Cinematographer Karim Hussein’s. The pace of the film while not glacial is slow allowing us time to adjust to this strange world that is reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s early work like Scanners (1981). The plot of the body swap in the service of assassination is straight forward. The film is not demanding that you worry about its plot as a puzzle like Tenet. Instead, it wants you to focus on the psychological effects on the main characters Colin Tate and Tasya Vos.
In a world of over blown and super smooth science fiction Brandon Cronenberg has served up a fine visceral psychological horror that freaks you out and makes you think.
