Possessor review – terrifying sci-fi horror freak-out | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week
With her current look in Panos Cosmatos’s sepulchral horror Mandy reverse a baying, gurning Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough grew to become the smartest type of modern scream-queen specialist. Now her face looms redly out of this unspeakable nightmare of the close to future, a masks of worry and blood. Possessor is the extremely unsettling new image from 40-year-old Canadian film-maker Brandon Cronenberg, and it exhibits the influences of his father David’s early work, significantly the cranium-splitting revulsion of Scanners. It’s a completely macabre satire of surveillance, company administration, paranoia and energy, with hints of Coppola’s The Conversation and Nolan’s Inception. There have been, by the way, moments once I even heretically puzzled if Possessor had a bit extra dramatic life and ahead motion than Inception.
Possessor is, above all, an ultra-violent sci-fi-horror freak-out that can in all probability have you ever hiding your face in your palms. (That’s what I did.) Almost the very first shot is of somebody inserting a scientific needle deep into their very own scalp. But the gore needs to be seen in the context of a unusually ingenious and apparently thought-through story that has the most outrageous and disturbing ultimate twist conceivable.
The setting is a metropolis in the mid-Twenty first century – Toronto, evidently – the place a top-secret company run by Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives assassination by proxy. Using occult mind-invasion know-how, they will kidnap and drug a possible one who is near the goal, join their mind to the killer’s in the again of a white van, thus introducing the killer’s consciousness into this particular person’s now zombified physique. The assassin controls it remotely for 48 hours like a robotic or an avatar in a pc sport, steering this animated dummy as much as the sufferer, shut sufficient for a stab or a shot.
Riseborough performs Tasya Vos, the company’s high killer, so good that Girder is taking an intense curiosity in her future and grooming Tasya for final management. But Tasya’s work is destroying her household life: she is semi-estranged from her husband and younger son and beginning to behave erratically whereas in “possession” of a cipher-killer. Things get out of management when she is requested to invade the physique of Colin (Christopher Abbott), a former coke vendor, to kill his elegant fiancee Ava (Tuppence Middleton) and his future father-in-law John Parse (Sean Bean), leaving the consumer, one other member of the family, in management of the profitable enterprise.
The level is that Parse is a tech baron specialising in knowledge mining, and there’s something about this murder-at-one-remove setup that makes the companies of Girder and Parse a very good match. Poor, put-upon Colin has been given a job by the smug John; he’s one of the many low-paid staff who spy on folks by way of the little cameras of their laptops. (This film might properly improve the numbers of folks taping these up.) They measurement up their decor, way of life and shopper needs. There are indications that Colin is already disaffected and alienated and he’s “leaking” into Tasya’s thoughts whereas she is inside him, merging with Tasya’s personal terrified sense of estrangement and household breakdown.
Getting inside folks’s heads is the holy grail of fashionable advertising and marketing. The old style idea of promoting would possibly as soon as have been about presenting prospects with a billboard bearing a tempting alternative, and even executing subliminal nudges in the course of a sure product. Now, knowledge analysis is about taking over area in the buyer’s consciousness, directing and coercing their consideration like a novelist or a film-maker. This is what Tasya does, nevertheless it’s additionally what Girder does. She is the company supervisor; she takes an curiosity in Tasya behaving as she would want her to behave. Possessor will be learn as a queasy allegory of delegation, making folks act always in bigger company pursuits whereas preserving the phantasm of alternative.
Cronenberg takes possession of his unusual, created world: subdued, smooth, eternally seen in darkness or an eerie twilight, and Girder speaks in her personal tech argot, easily warning Tasya of “minor artefacting” and “sync loss” when she seems to be shedding her grip. This is a film to knock you severely off steadiness.
• Possessor is offered on digital platforms from 27 November.
