Possessor

A woman in a powder blue tracksuit walks into the middle of a party packed with well dressed, glamorous guests. There's a heavy set man talking to another guest at the far end of the room. The woman walks towards him with purpose and when he reaches him she pulls out a knife and buries it in his neck severing his jugular vein. As he falls she stabs him again and again and again in the chest and the belly until his white shirt is completely red and her white trainers are destroyed from the pool of blood she's standing in. Then she pulls out a gun and puts it in her mouth.

If this paragraph was too much for you don't watch Possessor. A body swap story that's as far from Big as it's possible to get

Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is an assassin with a difference. She's a possessor, a person who's consciousness is implanted into the mind of another person, a patsy to do the wetwork so the real assassin can stay one step removed. The company she works for takes assassination contracts and Tanya is their MVP. But the work is starting to take it's toll on her psychologically. Every time she travels into the mind of another person she loses a piece of her own and its affecting her relationship with her husband and son. One hit has left her so rattled that she can't relate to her family at all and her only solution is to dive back into work. She's going into the mind of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) and this time it's a very lucrative job.

Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, seems to have inherited more than a touch of his father's skill when it comes to portraying the more horrifying sides of life. Set in an alternate present its a look at the endgame of letting technology into every aspect of our lives, in that eventually it will worm its way into our heads without us even knowing. You may scoff but look at the last few years, what we've let into our homes. Technology that records every word we speak, that's always spying on us. In true body horror style Cronenberg shows us how it will be used in the crimes of the future (injoke). It's a film that starts off in a surprising normal fashion (ok normal is subjective here) but as soon as things go arse-ways Possessor gets really entertaining and watching Tasya getting literally under the skin of Colin Tate mask gives us some dark laughs and some genuinely mindfucking visuals. Two words. Liquefying skin. 

There's a lot of penetration in Possessor. Not the sexual kind, although one very explicit glimpse of flesh will take you by surprise. No, the penetration in Possessor is all about blades and flesh, or penetration of the mind and soul. Vos and Girder and the company they work for don't paint themselves as bad guys but the work they do is horrifyingly invasive and can be read as a commentary on the insidious grasp tech companies have over us everyday. Yeah, we let them in but little do we know what they have on us. Like Cronenberg Snr's work in the 70's and 80's, using horror to deal with the societal issues of the day like STD's (Rabid), the Thalidomide scandal (Scanners) and abortion (The Fly), here we have Cronenberg Jnr doing the same with privacy issues. It's heady stuff, a satire of a dystopian future that we're already knee deep in but luckily a game cast does well carrying it off.

Andrea Riseborough might be the big name but she's not actually in the film that much. She's a portrait of drain and strain, with pale blonde locks turning her almost translucent. We see her go in and out of the minds of others and get a nice sense of the effect her job is having on her but Christopher Abbott does the heavy lifting here and he does great work as a man who's mind and life are crumbling before him. He has this haunted look about him even in his slivers of happiness and it suits the material perfectly. Both him and Riseborough have delved into the horror genre before, her with the insane 2018 film Mandy and him with last year's Argento-esque horror Piercing but this one is their most accomplished so far. It's hard to believe it's only Cronenberg's second feature after 2012's smart and disgusting Antiviral. I can't wait to see what comes next.

Possessor is streaming online now. It's really good but it's definitely not for the faint of heart.