Cast:
Andrea Riseborough (Tasya Vos), Christopher Abbott (Colin Tate), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Girder), Sean Bean (John Parse), Rossif Sutherland (Michael Vos), Tuppence Middleton (Ava Parse), Kaniehtiio Horn (Reeta), Raoul Bhaneja (Eddie), Gage Graham-Arbuthnot (Ira Vos), Rachael Crawford (Dr. Melis), and Gabrielle Graham (Holly Bergman) Written and Directed by Brandon Cronenberg.
Review:
“I never made a conscious decision to embrace horror specifically. It’s just where my instincts are right now. I’m making films that are honest and creative impulses. One of the things that I like about horror is that it explores parts of the spectrum of human emotion in a way that other genres don’t. That’s satisfying to me. I don’t want comfort food when I’m sitting down to watch a film. I want to be pushed into a different headspace."
Okay, to get it out of the way: like father, like son. Brandon Cronenberg was actually interested in books growing up in Toronto as the first-born son of David Cronenberg and Carolyn Zeifman. He thought about being a writer, painter, or a musician, but he soon found that film was his real interest in terms of study. As such, he studied it at Toronto Metropolitan University. He made his first feature with Antiviral (2012), a Canadian/French production that came out of his 2008 short Broken Tulips involving injecting viruses harvested from celebrities that was inspired by an infection he had when in film school. The time between that film and this one saw time spent developing the script to the latter along with doing a short film with Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You (2019). The idea for the film essentially came from his experiences in promoting his first film in public (and a few other things) that had him think about personal identity within public personas in the media self with its own life without oneself.
Oh sure, you could probably say that you've seen films before that engage with acting in someone else's body, such as say, Being John Malkovich (1999). But it is a fascinating subject when in the hands of someone who clearly is interested in showing a horror far beyond just being wrapped in someone else's body: the reality that is to befall the one who ends up actually keeping control of said body when all is said and done. You have an assassin with an interesting relationship with violence (specifically when it comes to methods of choice or in general) to go with a wandering grip on reality. Oh, and there is a handful of practical effects utilized for wonderful execution. The opening sequence isn't the big highlight of the film, but it gets the film on the right foot as a testing ground for what is next to come in terms of clinical effectiveness of possession in the ideal sense of chills on the inside (complete with a tear right before a suicide by cop). It is a grisly and bleak film set in a distinct type of setting where the best assassins are left to their devices to basically serve as actors for a time in the most cynical and clinical way imaginable for the clean kill. Just like in life, the best type of actor really does endure the longest above all, I suppose. In that sense, Riseborough and Abbott have the best type of challenge possible for a film like this, since by the time we are introduced to the latter (not particularly too long into the 104-minute runtime), one is seeing a mesh of puppeteer and puppet that jumps in definition depending on who looks in control. It might feel like a bad case of phantasmagoria, but it is a very apparent nightmare for our lead focus. The most interesting sequence to show this challenge might be the "data mining" sequence involving Abbott's character that is trying to do descriptions involving drapes in the background of certain videos, which at one point involves zooming past sex. The assassins and data miners are more alike than they wish to admit when it comes to paring people down to simple data points. I also particularly like the sequence involving Riseborough trying to practice the dip back into mother and wife for a couple of (on-screen) minutes that is full of great artifice. One can only be playing with fire when it comes to how long they spend acting as someone else right before they violently kill that part off, especially when they undergo evaluation each and every time when one finishes a job (in this case to see if they still regret killing and mounting a butterfly when they were young). Leigh makes a suitable logical master of puppets, if you think about it, since one never sees a veneer of grimace at the very nature of the character besides wanting the best in a certain type of labor. Bean isn't exactly in the movie too long, but he makes the kind of craven type that would find someone to kill off as a threat just as much as he would be a target of himself. Of course, the sequence involving the melting of one's face to reveal the other when it comes to that fateful possession is a damn great one in squirm-inducing curiosity that throws you in the right loop. Regardless of what you would expect for its ending, it makes for a suitably satisfying note to close such great horror in terms of identity that has managed to find just one thing at the end of confronting attachments and logic: death. Possessor is the kind of body horror film that makes you wonder aloud just what you possess about yourself as a person and the people that you associate with in labor and beyond.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
Next: Cronenberg-Cronenberg for the big 40.
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