Review: Possessor Turns Identity Theft into the Stuff of Gory Nightmares

Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is obsessed with tensions between mind and body, and old and new technologies. An analog man in a digital world, Cronenberg invests a narrative along the lines of his father David’s eXistenZ and Christopher Nolan’s Inception with psychedelic imagery and jolts of gouging, bone-splitting, unambiguously in-camera body horror that rival anything in modern cinema for tactility and pure outrageousness. In the process, he imbues Possessor with a disturbing irony: The film’s violence serves as a kind of relief for its perpetrators, who’re displaced by technological doodads and come to long for tangibility, corporeal terra firma, no matter how perverse. Cronenberg represents new-school displacement via old-school effects, refuting the everything-digital flim flam of more polished, “respectable” tent-pole productions.

Possessor opens with its most outrageous sequence. A young black woman, Holly (Gabrielle Graham), plugs what appears to be the power cord of an amp into her scalp, blood gurgling out of her head as her face twists in misery. She navigates the corridors of a fancy restaurant that’s rife with sharp, dangerous-looking decorations and fleshy noir colors that instantaneously establish the film’s aura of hallucinatory violence. Arriving at an upper level of the building, Holly approaches a heavyset, well-to-do-looking middle-aged white man in a dining hall and stabs him vigorously to death with a steak knife. Cronenberg’s staging leaves nothing to the imagination: We see the knife plunging into the man’s neck and chest at close range dozens of times, as blood drenches his and Holly’s bodies. Holly then produces a gun, trying and failing to summon the nerve to turn it on herself as police close in on her. Seemingly speaking to herself, Holly pleads with someone to let her out, and the cops gun her down.

The sequence is inherently charged even before Cronenberg injects another wrinkle of perversity into mix. Holly was “possessed” by a white woman, Tasya (Andrea Riseborough), who works for a cluster of freelance spy-assassins who hack into people’s minds to frame them for crimes for the gain of third-party clients. Suddenly, a visceral sequence that seemed ostentatiously nasty for its own sake is freighted with social resonance, as white people are benefitting from the framing and killing of black people. And this twist is intensified by clever misdirection: Before we learn the truth of Tasya’s profession, we’re driven to wonder if she was trying to prevent a murder rather than engineer it, as Tasya is introduced writhing in earnest pain in a coffin-shaped vessel, disconnecting from Holly’s consciousness. Cronenberg initially engenders sympathy for Tasya, whose profession is ultimately shown to be evil.

Cronenberg doesn’t elaborate further on the racial implications of the film’s first scene, which essentially functions as a self-contained short—one of several riffs here on the alienating possibilities of the supreme mental hijack, which the filmmaker eventually contrasts with corporate data-mining, an altogether more relatable kind of invasion. In both cases, people are subliminally controlled in order to serve the master cause of corporate profit. And though Tasya may be one of the manipulators, she’s nearly as subservient to “the system” as her victims, as the process of possession is wearing her down, detaching her from her own identity. In a chilling detail, Tasya practices acting familial before visiting her son (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot) and estranged husband (Rossif Sutherland), trying to remind herself how to be motherly and wifely, interested in the everyday textures of their lives. Tasya is pale and sickly—a ghost in flesh who’s being erased in a manner that suggests the ravages of drug addiction.

Possession and data-mining converge when Tasya, the master agent of her group, earmarked to eventually replace her supervisor, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is assigned to inhabit the body of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), a successful drug dealer who’s set to marry Ava (Tuppence Middleton), daughter of a smug and proudly amoral data raider, John Parse (Sean Bean). An unseen family member craves the Parse inheritance, and wants it to seem as if Colin has lost his mind in a relapse and killed John, Ava, and himself. Tasya, weak and unstable, is loaded into Colin’s mind only to find that his consciousness is willing to put up a fight for control of his body. What ensues is a surreal, mercilessly violent war of the minds.

In Inception, mental violation is equated arbitrarily to levels in a video game, signifying Nolan’s ongoing effort to render subjective elements of human life tediously objective. Cronenberg also physicalizes subjective terrain, but in a manner that nevertheless preserves the mess of neuroses. If Nolan is a classical violinist, Cronenberg is a punk drummer, thrashing away, fashioning images that suggest what might happen if Ingmar Bergman’s Persona were run through the filter of splatter-punk horror. As Tasya and Colin battle, their faces alternately melt and converge, culminating in an astonishing image: Tasya’s face as a kind of clay puppet, which Colin crushes inward so as to cast her out of his body.

This face literalizes the aforementioned, paradoxical notion of a ghost in the flesh, confirming Tasya’s own fears of annihilation even as she seeks to destroy another. As the two spirits become more and more confused, the escalating brutality writ upon collateral parties is understood to be part of a quest for the tangibility of the flesh that Cronenberg himself shares in his obsession with grainy, 1970s- and ’80s-era horror films. Even the methods of invasion that Tasya and her team use to hijack bodies are pointedly physical, dependent on dials and plugs and cords that are miles away from the anonymous tech of today, suggesting, once again, the instruments of a rock band. (These details are indebted to eXistenZ.)

Though Possessor favors nihilist spectacle to existentialism, Cronenberg is more interested in exploring emotional dislocation than Nolan. Passages in which Tasya-as-Colin wanders the corridors of the Parse empire, befuddled and lost—blending into the lurid skylines and chic corporate Feng shui and omnipresent cameras—succinctly and poignantly communicate the alienating effects of a polished and impersonal world that encourages everyone to steal everything from everyone else. And Possessor has an uncommonly nasty stinger in its tail that’s worthy of Saki, O. Henry, or Philip K. Dick: a punchline that asks us to consider the amorphous boundary separating Tasya’s nightmares from her forbidden yearnings.