Mark Reviews Movies: POSSESSOR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2020

The horror of Possessor extends a bit further than the ample amounts of violence and blood on display. Writer/director Brandon Cronenberg's opening scene establishes the bloodiness and the ongoing theme of a human bodies being penetrated in queasy ways, as well as the really terrifying idea at the core of his high-concept thriller. In that scene, we see a young woman inserting a pointy plug directly into the top of her head, in close-up, as blood freely streams from the entry point.

The discomfort doesn't stop there. That plug is connected to a small machine with an analog dial, and as the woman adjusts the device, her face goes through a series of emotions. The brain—part of the physical body—isn't just invaded in this story. The mind—that unknowable essence of a person's consciousness, identity, soul, or whatever one wants to call it—is violated.

Cronenberg's fairly straightforward plot revolves around a secret organization that performs assassinations. The crux of their methods is a kind of technology that allows a killer to enter the mind of an unaware host, take control of the person's body, and murder a target without anyone being the wiser about the organization's involvement. It's a smart, twisted premise, and while Cronenberg doesn't delve too deeply into anything beyond the plot, the film does treat its setup as the horrifying idea and mind game that it is.

After watching the woman stab an apparent stranger repeatedly with a steak knife at a party and be killed by the police, we meet the real murderer. She's Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), who had entered the woman's mind and taken control of her body from a remote laboratory at the orgainzation's headquarters. Tasya was supposed to end the mission with the woman committing "suicide," but something or someone inside the woman's mind fought back.

We briefly meet the killer's family—her husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland), from whom she's separated, and young son Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot)—as Tasya, rehearsing how she'll greet these people after everything she has experienced, attempts to return to some kind of domestic normalcy. It doesn't last long, and soon enough, Tasya's boss Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose own ability to infiltrate minds has diminished with age and too much practice, briefs her "star" assassin on the next mission.

This one involves some corporate espionage and sabotage. The targets are John Parse (Sean Bean), the CEO of a wealthy and powerful tech company, and his daughter Ava (Tuppence Middleton). The executive's stepson wants to take over the company, and with these two dead, he would be the sole beneficiary of his stepfather's empire. Tasya's organization sees this as a means of controlling the stepson and, by extension, the company itself.

As for the by-proxy "killer," that role belongs to Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), Ava's boyfriend, who works at his future father-in-law's company, spying on customers to gather trivial data about them. The plan is make it look as if Colin has a falling out with John and Ava, leading him to kill them and, then, himself.

In case it isn't clear by now, this is a plot-focused story, watching with dread as the plan unfolds. That sense of dread, though, is key to the film's success. We don't know much about these characters, even the central ones. Both Tasya and Colin are established as shells—she on account of her line of work, as well as her emotional detachment from whatever life she once had, and he because, well, there is only, as far as we can tell, another mind in control of Colin's every action.

Through "Colin's" interactions with Ava we get some information, notably that she both thinks he's acting strangely and has some expectation that such behavior can be the norm for him. There's a reason the organization chose him, after all. As this story eventually becomes a kind of tug-of-war over control of Colin's mind, Cronenberg visually suggests and has characters explicitly state that we might not always be seeing Tasya's influence over her host. If the idea of another mind holding control over one's thoughts and actions isn't frightening enough, the implications of when, how, and to what extent Tasya actually does have control—and, more importantly, when, how, and to what extent she doesn't—add another layer of discomfort to the conceit of this story.

On the surface, this is all about the plot, which has some devious twists and turns that develop with a feeling of terrible, inevitable logic (If one mind can control another, it stands to reason that the host is aware of the invading mind and its own thoughts). With that, though, is the terror directly connected to the central concept—that we're watching an innocent man be compelled or overtly controlled into doing something horrific (Cronenberg doesn't hold back on the gore, and one outburst of violence after another, especially one involving a fire poker, is shown or remembered in gruesome detail). As straightforward as the story and the idea underpinning it may be, Cronenberg's sometimes boldly surreal imagery (such as Tasya's face melting away, only to drip into place as Colin's, and a montage of Colin wearing his invader's face as a mask) and elliptical ventures into a mind at war with itself keep us off-kilter and on edge.

From the start, Possessor sets out to make us uncomfortable. Cronenberg undeniably succeeds in that regard, and he's made a clever, if disturbing, thriller, too.

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