It’s not really fair to people who carry the name of an iconic parent in the creative field. No matter how good one of those kids does, I suppose there will always be a sense in some quarters that the kid is coasting on the parent’s good name. Well, with Possessor Uncut (yes, that is its official name in the US, unfortunately), Brandon Cronenberg, son of iconic horror director David Cronenberg, has reduced that quarter to a bare minimum. No one could walk out of this film and, thinking about it fairly, accuse him of coasting on his dad’s name or on anything else for that matter. With this film, Cronenberg has announced himself as a true artist with epic ambitions, a personal vision and genuine greatness.
I think the less you know about this film going in the better, so avoid the trailer. I’ll just give you the barest premise which is that this film is set in a near future where technology allows paid assassins to jump into the bodies of innocent people and control their bodies, killing their targets and then leaping back out of their bodies once the job is done, leaving the innocent bystander to bear the consequences. Andrea Riseborough, always brilliant, is Tasya Vos and she’s the best in the business; but years of leaping in and out of other people’s bodies has broken her emotionally & psychologically, her sense of her own self wearing away, her marriage fracturing and her relationship with her young son withering. If she could escape this life, she might have a chance to rebuild herself. But her hard bitten supervisor, an excellent Jennifer Jason Leigh, has one more big job for her, just one. Last. Job. It’s no spoiler to say that this one last job doesn’t go according to plan. The rest of the cast fills out very nicely with Sean Bean is great, if underused, as an eminitely hateable big tech CEO and Tuppence Middleton is good as his daughter. Raoul Bhaneja steals every scene he’s in as an obnoxious tech worker. But this movie really belongs to Christopher Abbott, an actor I wasn’t familiar with, as the body targeted by Vos for this new job, the body Vos aims to take over and use to carry out her hit. I really cannot praise Abbott’s performance enough; it’s an incredibly raw and yet also incredibly nuanced performance. To say much more would get into spoilers, but let’s just say that Abbott’s character, Colin, ends up with a lot on his plate by the end of the movie and there’s not a single scene where he’s not absolutely killing it, no pun intended.
This is a really disorienting movie in the aesthetic sense and a confusing one in the plot sense. I was really paying attention the whole time and I still stumbled out of the theater in kind of a fog, my head spinning so much that I accidentally walked off and left my phone, my wallet and my car keys in the cup-holder of my seat. The telling of the story is filled with off-kilter visuals, fast montages and an unsettling score by Jim Williams. I’m glad I got to see it in a theater because of how intense it was, but it’s absolutely the kind of movie I could see inducing a seizure or motion sickness. Cronenberg is really telling the story of two characters, Tasya & Colin, who are profoundly mentally troubled and only getting worse. Cronenberg wants to put us in the heads of these characters and he does so by creating a sensory experience that borders on overload at times or, for some people I’m sure, actually does cross that line into pure overload. Couple this with a head scratching plot that had me absolutely confused for a solid half-hour at one point and you’ve got a movie that is likely to drive some people out of the theater screaming. Oh, did I mention the gore? Because, while the trappings of this movie are sci-fi, Cronenberg has his dad’s preoccupation with flesh and the mutilation thereof and that makes it equally a horror film in my opinion. The movie signals its stance on blood-letting early with a gruesome stabbing and, while there’s not a lot of violence on display here, when violence does break out, it’s . . . man, not for the faint of heart.
But while there are still a handful of moments that I’m not a hundred percent sure I understand, what I can tell you is that the movie has coalesced a great deal in the days since I watched it and I now think I understand a solid ninety to ninety-five percent of it and as the pieces fell slowly into place, the movie has only grown in my estimation until I’m now willing to assign it pure masterpiece status, a movie that’s essentially perfect in the way it explores its themes, tells its story, studies its characters and creates a wild and woolly experience. I can’t really get into the themes without getting into the plot and spoilers, but it’s very much a movie about the self, about identity and what makes us who we are, about power and consent and manipulation and, ultimately, about the human mind in extremis and the atrocities we, as humans, are willing to commit, the sheer maddening bloody havoc we’re willing to wreak, in order to achieve our goals. At the end of the film, I found myself very emotionally moved, even as I was still quite confused about a lot of things and it was both the unflinching nastiness of where the characters end up and the incredibly bleak statement about humanity that the film is making that resulted in that deep emotional response. And also those two things really do solidify the film as a horror movie as well. But it’s not just disgust or repulsion I felt at the end of this movie; it was genuinely cathartic and there’s one shot in particular right at the end that moved me to tears in the way a great tragedy does. I think I’ve honestly grown to love this movie even more than I did when I started writing this review; it’s a movie that every time I think about it, I’m just flabbergasted at how great it is. I fear overselling it, of course, but I guess it’s too late for that. Suffice it to say I think it’s a magnificent, towering piece of work and I can’t wait to see what Brandon Cronenberg does next. Is this movie for everyone? Oh, no, no, no, certainly not. But if you’re ready to have an intense, compelling, disturbing experience, go see Possessor; it’s a movie about minds and you’ll have yours absolutely blown. 4 stars.
tl;dr – mind-blowing, disturbing, shocking and disorienting masterpiece explores the broken human psyche; a masterful vision of sci-fi horror that lingers long after it ends. 4 stars.