All great films start with a concept. That initial hint of originality that sparks a great story and demands to be seen on the screen. Brandon Cronenberg’s (son of the great David Cronenberg) latest feature Possessor has one of the most insanely original concepts I’ve heard of in recent memory: assassins with the ability to meld their minds with civilians to carry out hits on targets close to them. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before. Unfortunately, Cronenberg doesn’t seem all that interested in exploring the potential of that idea and the impact it could have on the world, instead choosing to focus on an overly complex story of one particular assassin and the toll repeated trips into other people’s sub-consciousness’ have taken on her mind. From a technical perspective it is rock solid; the visuals all have a distinct sci-fi dystopian flair, the score is synth and electronic heavy yet still manages to be incredibly creepy and the performances are all top notch. Where Possessor fails is in its slow, almost crawling pace and its inability to choose an agenda and stick with it.
Now bear with me here as I try to explain this bonkers plot. Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is a top assassin working for a company that specialises in untraceable hits. They do this by melding Vos’ consciousness with that of an unsuspecting civilian close to the target, ingratiating her into that person’s life for a few days and then exacting the kill so as to look like a random act of violence or a psychotic break. Prolonged use of this mind-melding machine has made it harder and harder for Vos to separate her own consciousness from that of her many targets and makes reintegrating herself into her family life – with son Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot) and husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland) – between jobs incredibly difficult, worrying both her and her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh). There is clearly something wrong with Vos’ head when she receives her latest assignment; dispatching multi-million dollar data mining company CEO John Parse (Sean Bean) and his daughter Ava (Tuppence Middleton) by controlling her boyfriend Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) and capitalising on John’s dislike and abuse of Colin. Once in Tate’s body, Vos begins to realise the depth of her problems as he fights back for control, ripping and tearing the pair’s minds until a bloody showdown ensues for supremacy.
Phew. Now with all that happening, you would think that the film needs to move at a brisk pace to get through it all. Not so. Possessor is about as slow as a “slow burn” film can get, as Cronenberg meanders through scene after scene intent to linger on shots of faces and extreme violence. It doesn’t seem all that bad until the film takes a rather strange turn into the workings of Parses’ data mining company, where row after row of workers are strapped into eyewear which allows them to see through cameras inside people’s homes to suggest products they might need. An interesting concept that looks into our modern fear of the invasion of privacy in the digital age, but one which doesn’t seem to fit within the film and is never mentioned again. Its only purpose seems to be for some overtly creepy scenes as Vos (inside Tate’s body) lingers on people in their most intimate moments. Not something that endears you to a character, especially one that is supposed to be our lead into this confusing and different world. Likewise in scenes where Vos is going through the motions as Tate getting to know his routine. We’re forced to sit through scene after scene of Tate looking around confused, perplexed by the fact that water is blown off his hand by a hand dryer. I get that she’s in a different body but does skin not work the same? If the purpose of these scenes is to disrupt the normal movie viewing experience and make audiences feel uneasy in their own heads like Vos then that is certainly achieved, even before the frankly unsettling scenes where Vos and Tate swap genitalia.
The central conceit also falls apart in making the audience care about any of the characters. Vos seems cold and detached from the moment we meet her and is only made to feel less dependable as her memory is tested to ensure her mind is intact. From here we are introduced to her family but we never really get the sense Vos cares for them and her mind may even think they are the family of one of her victims. Once Vos enters Tate’s mind it becomes even more difficult to get attached. You can’t connect to Tate, played by Christopher Abbott, as he is not actually in control and Vos’ increasingly bizarre actions in his body are specifically engineered to give the impression that the man is having a nervous breakdown. When Vos picks a fight with Ava’s father at a party it doesn’t hit that this man is abusing Tate in the same way that it would if Tate was in control of his body. Vos is simply using this fact about his life to engineer a crime and in framing the plot this way Cronenberg never gives us as an audience anything to grasp onto. By exorcising Vos from her family you take away her only real human element, leaving the whole film feeling hollow and detached like the characters within that do such terrible things.
David Cronenberg is known as a pioneer in cinema for the way he pushed visual effects and the horrors you could present on-screen – most notably the incredible practical effects used in the Jeff Goldblum-led The Fly. The younger Cronenberg seems intent on making his own mark on cinema in the same fashion, by presenting the extremely unsettling images I mentioned before as well as some truly disturbing and graphic violence. The visual on the poster of a man wearing the face of a woman is featured prominently towards the end of the film and is a brilliant visual representation of the internal mental struggle happening on-screen. There is no gore here, it is just a simple mask that tells us all you need to know about Vos and Tate’s struggle. Unfortunately it is the only such example as the rest of the film features teeth bent out of people’s mouths and eyeballs popped from their sockets in sickeningly slow, up-close sequences. It adds nothing to the film other than shock value and shows a lack of understanding of the elder Cronenberg’s use of gore. The Fly was about a man who risked everything for the science that he loved and his slow descent into a hideous creature is a visual representation of the toll this obsession has wreaked on his life. Possessor is just gore for the sake of it.
Despite this, Cronenberg does succeed in the technical aspects of the film. Most of the visuals (excluding the disturbing ones I mentioned before) are suitably high-concept and paint a cold, detached world that matches the characters that inhabit it. Shots are often flooded with a brilliant hues of pink and red, giving the whole scene a menacing tone – indicating the bloodshed to follow – and it looks fantastic. Likewise the scenes where Vos melds minds with her target are suitably crazy, with flashing images of plastic heads melting and screaming faces visualising the anguish the procedure takes on the assassin. They look almost like an experimental film in their madness but it goes a long way to sell the experience without having to spend a huge budget, until Cronenberg gets a bit carried away with it towards the end of the film and it turns into something of an epileptic nightmare. There is a wholly original, genuine sense of tension that Cronenberg does craft on occasion, in watching Vos attempt to slip into someone’s life without being caught out. It plays a bit like a very serious, high stakes reversal of Freaky Friday and gives the audience some feeling other than disgust and boredom, if only for a few minutes.
Possessor is a film I have no desire to ever see again and one that I can’t recommend to many people. If you like incredibly complex, violent and slow sci-fi horror, then this is for you; go ahead and enjoy. For most audiences though, this is going to be far too much to handle, as Cronenberg refuses to give them anything to latch on to with distant, irredeemable characters that do terrible things. With some films I often wonder what it would be like to watch them again for the first time; to jump into their head and experience the first terrifying roar of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park or the lightsaber ignite for the first time in Star Wars. With Possessor I almost long to go into the head of someone who didn’t see the film, if only to get the disgusting imagery out of my head for a moment or two.
Possessor stars Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tuppence Middleton, Rossif Sutherland, Hanneke Talbot, Gage Graham-Arbuthnot & Sean Bean – In select cinemas now.