Brandon Cronenberg’s new movie, Infinity Pool, is out in Australia this week, so why not take the opportunity to revisit his second film: Possessor, a blisteringly imaginative scifi-horror movie that messes with your brain.
Tasya Voss (Andrea Riseborough) is an assassin for a secretive organisation, trained to kill using brain implant technology that allows her to inhabit – or “possess” – the body and consciousness of a third party in order to get close to her quarry.
Voss is separated from her husband and young son, who have no idea about the double life she leads. She’s a ruthless and talented killer and her boss, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), wants Voss to become her successor – but the job isn’t as easy as it once was, and the lines between Voss’s real self and her assumed identities are beginning to blur.
She accepts an assignment to assassinate tech billionaire John Parse (Sean Bean) by “possessing” his daughter’s boyfriend, Colin (Christopher Abbott). She has three days to make her move – but things don’t go to plan, resulting in Colin and Voss wrestling for control of his mind. She is unable to return to her own consciousness until she can force Colin to commit suicide.
With only three feature films under his belt, you can already rely on a Brandon Cronenberg movie to have a wild premise. Infinity Pool features Cronenberg’s inimitable take on cloning; his debut feature, Antiviral, is based around the concept of celebrity viruses becoming a sought-after commodity. Possessor’s take on mind control – tech that allows Voss to become another person – hits like a deviant episode of Quantum Leap.
Possessor is set in an alternate reality: it looks much the same as our world, yet is differentiated by small details and large technological advancements. Everybody vapes, big tech companies are data-mining our every move and dangerous technology is in the wrong hands. (So not that different from our universe, on second thought.)
It was the unique filmography of Cronenberg’s father David that lead to the adjective Cronenbergian being coined; still, in Possessor, there’s a lot of Cronenbergian weirdness in the design of the machinery. Everyday tech, like the possession calibration gadgets and the bug-eye VR headsets, appear well loved and therefore quite believable. The headpiece Voss wears while inhabiting a target is a bizarre mixture of hospital equipment and proboscis-like tubes. This insect motif is fitting: by forcing herself into the mind of a victim and living there undetected, Voss is a parasite.
If there are any certainties in life, then they must surely be death, taxes and that Riseborough will be excellent in whatever you are watching. Her Voss seems disconnected, never entirely present; sifting through the remnants of the multiple identities she has worn and struggling to find the scrambled memories that belong to her. But she carries out her work with cold efficiency, bringing to mind elements of Riseborough’s performance in Crocodile, John Hillcoat’s unremittingly bleak episode of Black Mirror.
As Colin, Abbott continues to be one of the most interesting actors, having appeared in a run of movies that includes Black Bear, It Comes At Night and Nicolas Pesce’s dark and criminally underseen Piercing. Colin is chosen as expendable collateral, with a believable motive for killing his girlfriend’s father. In one electrifying scene, he rages at Bean’s patronising rich guy, screaming: “You think you can step on me?” We have no idea if it’s Voss or Colin talking.
Possessor is also a very bloody movie, so not everyone is going to like it. It’s visceral and nasty at times, but so are these characters. The violence is also not Possessor’s focus: if David Cronenberg is synonymous with body horror, Brandon Cronenberg is exploring the horrors of the mind. And the result is, I think, one of the most imaginative and exciting horror movies of this century.
