Film Review: Possessor

Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Starring: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Rossif Sutherland
Running time: 108 minutes

Back in the director’s chair for the first time since his 2012 debut, Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg returns with an ultra-violent cyberpunk horror that plays on the loss of privacy and our darkest fears in the digital age. 

The version that has arrived on Blu-Ray and streaming this week sells itself as the full ‘uncut’ experience, and it definitely earns its reputation as a gnarly piece of horror filmmaking. Set in the near future, we follow Tasya Vos (played with aplomb by British actress Andrea Riseborough), an assassin who inhabits the bodies of people close to her targets in order to perform high-risk killings. 

Following her successful but extreme killing of a high-profile businessman, she is assigned to take out the CEO and founder of a vast data-mining and surveillance, John Parse (Sean Bean) and his daughter, Ava (Tuppence Middleton). The shadowy organisation she works for has scouted Colin (Christopher Abbott), a former level low drug dealer who is now engaged to Ava, as her way in. 

In Cronenberg’s bleak vision of the future, privacy invasions have become openly commonplace. Colin’s nine-to-five job sees him silently watching through webcams to ascertain what type of curtains people are buying. What we fear in 2021 has become the standard and our final bastion of privacy, our sense of self, is being eroded and hijacked. 

Vos, alienated and exhausted, has become both mentally and physically a slave to her work. Watching from afar, she learns Colin’s mannerisms, as she does for all her marks, but once they pull her out, her greatest challenge seems to be becoming herself again.

Her constant detachment from reality has led to a difficult relationship with her estranged but caring husband, Michael (Rossif Sutherland) and she has begun to struggle showing genuine emotion to her young son, Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot). Her handler, Girder (Jennifer Jason-Leigh), gives her little sympathy. To her, Vos’ attachments to the real world are hindrances to her work, serving only to hold her back from her full potential.

Performances are stellar across the board, but Riseborough, who has been building momentum since 2018’s psychedelic revenge opera, Mandy, is the star of the show. Despite appearing in relatively few scenes by nature of the story, her harrowing and nuanced performance carries a weight that can be felt throughout. She perfectly compliments Abbott’s performance as Colin. His ability to seem uncomfortable in his own skin, as if it clings to him like an ill-fitting suit, brings an uncanny and queasy edge to the film. 

Cronenberg’s approach borders on the experimental, choosing to tell a lot of the story through abstract, dreamlike sequences of bodies melding together and tearing apart. There is a disturbingly hypnotic nature to them, as Cronenberg artfully pushes the boundaries of body and mind. 

While the violence certainly earns the film its reputation, cinematographer Karim Hussain’s elegantly stylish visuals prevent it from ever feeling like just another bit of cheap exploitation trash. It may be hard to watch for some viewers, no scene ever feels like it’s purely there to make you feel a bit sick. 

Underneath, Jim Williams’ score rumbles and drones, lulling you into a trance as Vos’ waking nightmare becomes more textured and frenzied. Those familiar with Ben Wheatley’s 2011 hitman horror, Kill List, can expect a similarly glacial soundscape. 

It’s not a movie for everyone. Those lured in by its high-concept premise for a story may find little reward in its slow-burning and ambiguous plot. Whilst it isn’t an impenetrably obscure film, it does at times feel like it hasn’t fully realised its potential.

Possessor is a hard watch but it rewards patience. In our darkly digital age, it offers both a timely and unique vision of the future, and like all good science-fiction, it’s as believable as it is terrifying. 

Did you know? Possessor was inspired in part by the 1970 book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society by Jose Delgado. The book demonstrates how, through the use of radio control, it may be possible to control people's memories, emotion and thinking process.

Possesor is available now on Blu-Ray and to rent